as I was told from early education that the air we currently breathe in contains 21% oxygen and 77-ish% of nitrogen and the rest are other particles.
So I have a dumb question on what the body uses nitrogen we breathe in for?
In: 387
Like others have said, the body really does nothing with the nitrogen, but it does go a little bit further than that. Our bodies are actually wired to ignore the presence of nitrogen to the point that, if you were to introduce yourself to a 100% nitrogen environment, you would die of asphyxiation and never feel like anything is wrong. You would just kind of go to sleep from oxygen deprivation and die.
As in, when you hold your breath, the buildup of carbon dioxide gives you that suffocation feeling, the burning in your lungs and stuff. Nitrogen doesn’t cause that because our bodies are actively wired to ignore it.
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