When we eat food how powerful is the acid in our stomach, is it powerful enough to kill a life? For example, if someone ate goldfish or shrimp alive. How does it work, do the acid kill them immediately or they die slowly.
In: Biology
Can’t speak for how fast it will kill but our stomach acid is pretty strong. If the inside of our stomach wasn’t lined with mucus, the acid would burn right through it.
The lack of oxygen would kill a fish long before the stomach acid does.
It would certainly start to damage their gills immediately, but it’s so viscous and oxygen-poor that they wouldn’t get any useful oxygenation out of your gastric juices and they’d suffocate before they die from chemical burns.
I’m sure you’ve thrown up before so you know how strong stomach acid is. Strong enough to be deeply unpleasant to relatively sensitive tissues in your throat and head, but not burning holes in the floor either.
other people have answered the actual question but one thing I find interesting is that different animals have different strengths of stomach acid, which is one of the reasons they can eat nastier food than us. for example, vultures have very strong stomach acid that can kill pathogens that if ingested would make other animals (including humans) sick, so they’re a very important part of keeping an ecosystem safe.
The acid itself isn’t all that strong pH is around 2. Not something you’d want on your hands but you wouldn’t feel them burning so long as you washed it off within a few minutes. The real power for digestion comes from the enzymes.
This are made by the body specifically to chop up the chemical bonds in food. This is what reduces the meat and veg we eat into essentially liquid. The acid is just their to give those enzymes the pH that they work best at.
As for your eating a fish live while the acid would slowly damage their gills the lack of oxygen and being crushed/suffocated by the muscles in your digestive tract would probably kill them long before.
I think its somewhere around 3 to 4, around soft drink pH. It’s not quite enough to straight up dissolve food, but it helps to break chewed up stuff apart and loosen it up a little. There are a lot of other enzymes like proteases that enzymatically digest the food as well, and more digestion occurs through the gi tract. Stomach acid I’m pretty sure isn’t made by just your body dumping in hcl, it pumps H+ into it, lowering the pH the same way an acid would
There’s a reason we salivate before we vomit, it’s the body’s way of protecting your teeth from that brutal acid. Also never brush your teeth after vomiting, the abrasion isn’t good.
If I was in prison and threw up on the cell bars everyday what would happen?
Asking for a friend.
https://youtu.be/NddZ5ftQb0Q?feature=shared This is a good channel for all things chemistry. There are two parts, it might answer your question.
I’m reminded of a high school science project (arguing against biting your fingernails -it was 60 yrs ago) that demonstrated that stomach acid would not dissolve fingernail clippings. We worried about different things in the 60s! 😀
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