This motor program continuously adapts to changes in food type or occlusion. This adaptation is a learned skill that may sometimes require relearning to adapt to loss of teeth or to dental appliances such as dentures. It is thought that conscious mediation is important in the limitation of parafunctional habits as most commonly, the motor program can be excessively engaged during periods of sleep and times of stress. It is also theorized that excessive input to the motor program from myofascial pain or occlusal imbalance can contribute to parafunctional habits. Muscles Nutrition and health Chewing stimulates saliva production and increases sensory perception of the food being eaten, controlling when the food is swallowed. Evidence from one study suggests that chewing almonds 25-40 times kept people fuller while also allowing them to get more nutrients out of the almonds. The researchers also suggest that this is likely to be the case in other foods. Eating food which does not require chewing, by choice or due to medical reasons as tooth loss, is known as a soft diet. Such a diet may lead to inadequate nutrition due to a reduction in fruit and vegetable intake. Chewing also stimulates the hippocampus and is necessary to maintain its normal function. In other animals Chewing is largely an adaptation for mammalian herbivory. Carnivores generally chew very little or swallow their food whole or in chunks. This act of gulping food (or medicine pills) without chewing has inspired the English idiom "wolfing it down". Other animals such as cows chew their food for long periods to allow for proper digestion in a process known as rumination. Rumination in cows has been shown by researchers to intensify during the night. They concluded that cows chewed more intently in the night time compared to the morning. Ornithopods, a group of dinosaurs including the Hadrosaurids ("duck-bills"), developed teeth analogous to mammalian molars and incisors during the Cretaceous period; this advanced, cow-like dentition allowed the creatures to obtain more nutrients from the tough plant life. This may have given them the advantage needed to compete with the formidable sauropods, who depended on their massive gastrointestinal tracts to digest food without grinding it, in their ecological niches. They eventually became some of the most successful animals on the planet until the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event wiped them out. In machinery The process of chewing has, by analogy, been applied to machinery. The