I sometimes drink diluted apple cider vinegar because it feels like it helps with nausea and indigestion. Even when I dilute it 5 parts water to 1 part vinegar it kind of burns going down. Coca Cola seems to help with nausea and indigestion just as much, has about the same acidity as straight vinegar (2.5 pH) but actually feels cooling when it goes down. Is there something else in vinegar that causes that burning sensation?
In: Chemistry
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Acetic acid is stronger than carbonic acid.
Acetic acid is what is in vinegar. Vinegar is already diluted acetic acid.
Carbonic acid is a consequence of dissolving CO2 into water.
Different kind of acid, Vinegar has acetic acid where as Cola has carbonic acid. Similarly Orange juice has Citric acid. I don’t know the difference between any of those but Google probably does.
pH is a measurement of the the strength of an acid, the lower the pH the “stronger” the acid is and this has to do with the chemistry of the molecules that make up the acid. But pH doesn’t tell you *how much* acid you have, that is a word called ‘Molarity’. You could have two glasses of front of you with the same pH but one could be a pure, weak acid (high molarity) while the other could be 1 drop of a super powerful acid in a glass of water (low molarity). Sensory wise the first cup would taste however the acid tastes while the second would taste like water but the “acid feeling” of the first cup would be more intense then the second because of the higher molarity.
You can compare this to temperature. I can roast a fish wrapped in tin-foil in my oven on a cast iron pan. The tin foil and the pan are the same temperature but I can pick up the tin foil, but pan will burn me because temperature is only a measure of intensity while “heat capacity” is a measure of amount.
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