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
Under normal conditions it doesn’t really do anything. In anesthesia we use it because it will help keep the small air sacks (alveoli) open and prevent absorption atelectasis. This is a condition caused when you have 100% oxygen, all of that oxygen can quickly diffuse into the blood leaving nothing in the alveoli to help them stay open. By reducing the percentage of oxygen with normal nitrogen containing air, the nitrogen will remain behind and prevent the alveoli from collapsing as easily.
Nitrogen is used for diluting the oxygen, because 100% oxygen are deadly harmful for cells. Consider why H2O2 has the effects of killing the bacteria and germs? Because the decomposition of H2O2 will release pure oxygen as it is deadly harmful. So nitrogen can dilute oxygen and nitrogen itself is inert which will not influence our cell.
Just like salt is important for us, but all the living creatures can not survival in pure salt. Life come from sea which is a kind of water solution with salt.
Nitrogen prevents the oxygen from being dangerous to the body. Oxygen likes to react with other substances especially if it’s not O₂. The limit we can survive is 1.7 Bar pressure, but even before that it does small damages.
[German] [https://www.swr.de/wissen/1000-antworten/kann-ein-mensch-zum-atmen-mit-reinem-sauerstoff-auskommen-100.html](https://www.swr.de/wissen/1000-antworten/kann-ein-mensch-zum-atmen-mit-reinem-sauerstoff-auskommen-100.html)
Also it allows us (by not being CO₂) to get rid of the CO₂ we produce.
It is the equivalent of swallowing a marble. It just passes through without any interaction. Kind of like the air equivalent of fiber.
Nothing, so much so that if you take the nitrogen out of the air we breathe completely we’d still be fine. This is actually what they do in spacesuits, they are filled with pure oxygen at 4.3psi compared to normal atmospheric pressure of oxygen+nitrogen at 14.7psi. Having a low pressure in the suit like this means they’re not so inflated so easier to make them flexible to move around in (think the difference between a deflated and fully inflated football)
It has a slight narcotic effect.
See [The anesthetic effect of air at atmospheric pressure (1975)](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1130736/):
> Nitrogen has recognized narcotic potential at hyperbaric pressures. No narcotic effect of helium has been demonstrated at any pressure. We evaluated the effect of nitrogen in air at one atmosphere on human performance by comparing it with helium-oxygen using a four-alternative divided-attention task that requires rapid response to auditory and visual signal changes. There was a 9.3 per cent decrease in response time when subjects breathed helium-oxygen, a signigicant change (P less than 0.001). This change could not be ascribed to practice since the order of presentation of gases did not have a significant effect. It concluded that the **nitrogen in ambient air slightly but measurable impairs human performance compared with a non-anesthetic gas such as helium**.
The nitrogen’s just there to hold everything. If you think of a pool crowded with toys- the oxygen and carbon dioxide would be the toys and the nitrogen would be the water that holds them up so you can use them.
Aside from providing pressure to the air we do need which allows us to breathe it in, you should consider that we are merely surviving in this world; it wasn’t MADE for us so there are a lot of adapted actions that are wasteful, regardless of how imperitive they are for survival. Look at trout spawning 1,000s of young only to have a few survive. Seems wasteful, but in the trouts evolutionary journey this is whats working for it right now. Maybe in the future we’ll find ways to extract and utilize only the reactants we need to survive rather than passing all the extra “waste” we currently do just by existing.
Your body needs nutrients to live, and yet you are roughly 60% water. Same concept. Too much of something can be a bad thing just the same as too little.
Absolutely nothing. Nitrogen is completely unnecessary for the human body. In fact, deep water divers actively avoid nitrogen since too much nitrogen in the body causes nitrogen narcosis, which causes a drunken-like state. The gas mixes they use usually swap out the nitrogen for another inert gas like helium or argon.
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