Why can’t we absorb oxygen from the water (H2O) we drink?
In: Chemistry
We actually do the exact opposite. We make water out of oxygen in the air. We do this by combining it with protons, which are really just hydrogen nuclei. That is why we breathe oxygen, to dispose of all of these waste protons that are a byproduct of us digesting food.
The reason we cannot absorb the oxygen in water is because molecular oxygen is a very reactive substance. It forms very stable bonds with protons, and it is comparatively quite hard to break those bonds apart. We don’t have the biological tools to do it. Plants do have those biological tools, and do they use them to extract the protons bound to oxygen in water and combine those with carbon dioxide to make sugars.
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