Averaging Bite Forces

Have you heard the whole “a finger can be bit off as easily as biting into a carrot” myth that sometimes floats around? (It’s especially common with kids fascinated by this sort of stuff.)

Jaw strength is quite an interesting thing when you look into it. For example, it’s measured by pounds per square inch, and the human molar is typically where our bite force is strongest.

So, if you had to guess what the average bite strength of an adult human was, what would you place your number around? 20 pounds? 50? 120 pounds? Try 200. That seems like an awful lot of force, doesn’t it? That’s like an adult American male sitting on a single spot that is 1 inch wide and 1 inch long.

Yeah, that’s how it works. But when you really start to think about how hard your siblings would bite down on your hand or arm when you were younger and everyone fought with one another, it starts to make a little sense. I mean, someone biting you with force really hurts. So, of course a 200 pound man sitting on a very small area would really hurt. It kind of adds up.

What gets really interesting, however, is when you start looking into the bite force of other animals. How do you think we compare?

Well, it probably comes as no surprise that we have one of the weaker bite forces out of the animal kingdom.

For land animals, you’d probably be making good guesses if you said lions or tigers (1000 PSI) had some of the most powerful bites. And surely some of you guessed that grizzly or polar bears (~1200 PSI) was the winner.

But if you consider it a “land” animal, well, the Nile crocodile wins by a long shot with a 5000 PSI bite force. For reference, that’s 25 times stronger than an average human’s bite force. No wonder they’re considered some of the most dangerous and fearsome predators in the world.

Now, great white sharks are estimated to have an even stronger bite force than Nile crocs, but there has never been a true test to measure the “strongest” bite force ever on a great white. Theoretically, though, they may just be our winners.

So when you think about biting down on something as hard as you can, humans are relatively good at grinding and piercing what we need to when going at a piece of steak. One of the closer bite forces to ours that is also a companion to us is domesticated dogs. For example, pitbulls have around 225 PSI bite forces. Typically, we would regard pitbulls as a very muscular and sometimes vicious dog, so the fact that our bite force is close to theirs shows we’re nothing of a chump in the bite department.

Cultural Perspectives on Dental Health

Have you ever noticed how people from different countries, even those more developed, don’t have as great of dental health as Americans seem to?

I definitely have. And while it’s likely a bit of an exaggerated stereotype that Europeans have “worse” teeth than us, there’s something to be said about the crookedness of teeth you typically see in other cultures.

Now, I can’t speak on behalf of non-Americans, simply because it’s unfair to categorize so many people into one type, so this is definitely just my musings after watching a fair amount of British television lately. It’s more of an observation I’ve made rather than some sort of truth about anyone from England.

But what I’m getting at is that it seems that you’re more likely to see some slightly crooked teeth in other nations’ peoples than you are in America. And my guess would be that braces just aren’t as popular during teenage years in those countries.

To me, this makes me wonder about the need of braces. While extreme cases do warrant braces as not to cause issues with chewing food or teeth becoming unable to be cleaned, more minor cases that are still noticeable most likely just don’t need correcting.

If anything, this points out America’s obsession with perfection and looks. If braces aren’t usually needed, why do we still get them? Well, as a highly capitalist country, businesses are much more pushy on things you “need” when you probably don’t quite need them. And dentists are just as much business people as any other profession stateside.

So, braces have become a very common part of American culture in the past few decades. It’s quite normal, actually, for kids to have braces at some point in their lives to have straight teeth for the rest over their time. In fact, I would almost say it’s slightly abnormal for people to not have braces growing up, marking me as one of the unusual cases of the American youth.

Nonetheless, none of this is saying that braces are bad or malevolent by any means. It’s just that it makes sense that Americans are the most likely people to have braces because of the importance we place on how we look. And teeth are a big part of that, for us. We look at others’ teeth when evaluating them as a potential partner. Heck, we look at teeth when making snap judgments about people.

Overall, this all goes to show that there are reasons that cultures become the way they are. It’s not that other nations don’t care about their own teeth. They definitely do, but just in different ways.