I know the question is a little silly, but it’s been keeping me up for a while for some odd reason.
Why is it that we already have HCl in our stomachs, but drinking HCl would cause a problem? Or would it? I know it would burn your throat, mouth, etc, but if you were to run a tube down your throat to your stomach in a similar way to a feeding tube, wouldn’t you be able to add more HCl to your stomach without damaging anything? Or is the HCl in our stomachs different from the one we get in chemist stores?
For example, instead of eating foods to build back your stomach acid levels, can’t you just put more in via a tube?
In: Chemistry
It’s the concentration. Stomach acid’s HCl concentration is anywhere from 8 x 10^-2 M to 1.2 x 10^-3 M (google searches show diff results, idk which is true). Suppose if you drink an HCl solution with the same concentration as stomach acid, it would be fine? But muriatic acid is at 9.9M, so it’s roughly like 1000x more concentrated than stomach acid. That’s a significant difference.
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