If our body needs oxygen in the air to live. then what the 77% of nitrogen do to our body?

Question

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

Answer 1

Nothing. Nitrogen in the air is inert. Our bodies don’t do anything with it, we just inhale it and exhale it again. The only time nitrogen in the air is important is when a person moves between environments with very different air pressures, like when scuba diving.

Note that nitrogen is present in many molecules that we need to survive, but we don’t get it from breathing, we get it from our food.