To my understanding, water has no nutritional value. It has nothing in it. It’s simply just water.
That said, why is it so crucial to life?
In: 55
>To my understanding, water has no nutritional value. It has nothing in it.
You are ranking things important to ‘life’ by their nutritional value which is not the best way to think of them
Water has limited nutritional value to humans yes, but in terms of chemistry and what it can do, it’s incredible
Water can act as a solvent (it dissolves things into liquids) for a wide range of chemicals/foods/objects which is incredibly useful for life (there is a quote that if humans weren’t made of water, then we would find it the most terrifying thing in existence),
In the most basic sense, for complex life to occur, you need lots of little things to mix together, and water is the thing that lets this happen, solids and gases are difficult to mix or require a lot of things in place before controlled mixing takes place, but mixing liquids is fairly straightforward in comparison, so most of life uses mixtures of liquids, and water is the best thing to use to get things into liquid in order to mix in the first place (some of the simplest organisms exist and survive in liquids for this reason)
Because we (humans, or any animal really) need to dissolve anything we eat to get the nutrients etc. from them, we need something to help break down our food, and water dissolves things enough that we can break down the food, but it doesn’t dissolve things so fast that they become unusable before our bodies can metabolise them
We do this (metabolization) by either breaking the larger/complex molecules in the foods down into smaller molecules or making larger molecules from the smaller ones – our bodies use water for this process (vastly oversimplified) without metabolization, complex life most certainly wouldn’t exist
Because so many things can be dissolved in water, then while a glass of water from a tap may have little in it of nutritional value to humans (or ‘nothing’ as you broadly state), somewhere like the Atlantic Ocean, the water has a *lot* of things floating in it that are essential for aquatic life (dissolved oxygen, various ions, salts etc. that marine life has evolved to take advantage of), and plant life (including photosynthesis, where the hydrogen and oxygen in water is crucial for making glucose alongside carbon dioxide from the air)
TL:DR water is used to make the nutrients that plants and animals need to survive, without it then life would be very different
Latest Answers