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
Nitrogen is absorbed through our lungs and dissolved in our blood and other tissues where it does … almost nothing. Divers experience nitrogen narcosis when high pressure underwater increases the amounts of nitrogen in our systems, like 1 standard drink per 10 m of depth. Presumably there’s some very slight effect even at normal atmospheric pressure and I wonder if we’d be more clear-headed if we replaced the nitrogen with helium or neon.
Nitrogen gas is inert. It doesn’t easily react under usual conditions and requires chemical processes that we don’t use to break it apart.
There’s a line in the Yes Minister show where they were trying to explain what inert means. The best they could come up with was “not ert”, and “wouldn’t ‘ert’ a fly”. Likewise, nitrogen at regular atmospheric pressure is merely a filler gas for us. We don’t notice it, apart from the volume of air we breathe. It just goes in and out of us, untouched and unchanged. We’d not even notice it if it displaced the oxygen we need – we’d just quietly pass out and die. It’s not the nitrogen that would kill us, but the lack of oxygen.
However, under high pressure differentials such as for deep sea divers, nitrogen in the blood can be a huge problem – accumulating and bubbling in the blood causing decompression sickness. But this is at unusual pressures and pressure differentials beyond usual human operating conditions; for every day concerns, nitrogen is just there, doing very little.
Air is made of many gases, but the most abundant of them is nitrogen.
Like many have pointed out, nitrogen is an inerts gas, meaning it does not react very easily with everything.
This makes it very useful for us, because when we breath air, all that mixture fills our lungs, but the lungs only take the oxygen. This is because oxygen can float freely in the nitrogen.
When oxygen touches our lung walls, then it gets absorbed.
Nitrogen can also carry out gases we don’t need like CO2.
It acts as a carrier vessel for oxygen we need and takes out gases we don’t need like CO2.
Oxygen in high amounts is toxic. Our cells would be damaged from long exposure to high oxygen content.
Since nitrogen is not easily absorbed it keeps the air sacs (alveoli) in our lungs expanded for better gas exchange. This helps prevent collapse of the air sacs (atelactasis) and the bad things that come from that.
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.
Nitrogen gas is highly stable. Our body can’t process it. That’s why we need nitrogen in our food.
To answer your question: It does nothing.
Not much directly. Indirectly – look on it as diluting the oxygen to a manageable level. Don’t assume that, just because we use oxygen, it’s somehow a “good” gas – it’s way too reactive. That makes it nasty, horribly corrosive stuff that you do NOT want too much of.
Nothing under normal Air Pressure.
Nitrogen did very hardly react with anything.
fun fact
If you dive with the normal pressured air going deeper than 40 Meters sometimes the nitrogen did funny things and you get a kind of drunk.
Is with any narcotics it is unknown how that happens.
Many people are saying the nitrogen does nothing, but it actually has one very important job: it dilutes the oxygen, if we were to inhale air with 100% oxygen our lungs would quite literally burn up
A lot of people are saying we breath it out. We do.
But it’s not useless. For lack of better phrasing, it acts as lubricant for our alveoli in our lungs.
Without nitrogen in the air, our lungs are going to dry out and get real messed up real quick. It’ll only take a couple days for it to be totally washed out.
We probably don’t need a ton of nitrogen, but we do need some.
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