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
Our feeble little bodies can’t handle nitrogen as it exists in the atmosphere. The reason we utilize oxygen is because our cells are capable of breaking O2s bond and reacting the oxygen with fats and sugars in our bodies to keep us going. While nitrogen is an important building block for the proteins in our body, the triple bond between diatomic nitrogen is too strong for anything in our body to break, so it passes through us without interacting with us at all.
We get the nitrogen in our bodies from bacteria (and maybe other things, I’m not 100% sure) that ARE capable of breaking the triple bond. It’s a process called “nitrogen fixing”. They often live on the roots of certain plants and have a symbiotic relationship with them, providing the necessary ammonia for the plants to grow.
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