Comments on: Nutritious Gas

Question: Nutritious Gas

Orange Goblin — Wed, 02 Jun 2004 12:33:18 -0800

Why aren't there any gases with nutritional value?

By: Pretty_Generic

Pretty_Generic — Wed, 02 Jun 2004 12:42:56 -0800

Try swallowing a fart, and you'll see.

By: milovoo

milovoo — Wed, 02 Jun 2004 12:53:09 -0800

If the trend of airs and foams continue, we may well see nutritional gas at the haute coutre level.

By: ewagoner

ewagoner — Wed, 02 Jun 2004 12:54:14 -0800

It's not so much that there aren't any nutritious gasses, it's that we don't have a physical means to digest them. Plenty of other life forms do.

By: riffola

riffola — Wed, 02 Jun 2004 13:01:53 -0800

Oxygen has plenty of nutritional value. It's hard to live without it. I'm sure the USDA recommends you get a healthy dosage of it everyday. :)

By: milovoo

milovoo — Wed, 02 Jun 2004 13:02:31 -0800

Is there anything higher than bacteria that can?

By: falconred

falconred — Wed, 02 Jun 2004 13:12:42 -0800

Because Oxygen is not a food, it's a drug (yes I'm serious):

"Under the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, any type of oxygen used by people for breathing and administered by another person is a prescription drug."

I'm guessing the other gasses are also classed as drugs. And there's no daily nutritional values calculated for drugs.

By: Pretty_Generic

Pretty_Generic — Wed, 02 Jun 2004 13:18:20 -0800

Wouldn't that make salt a drug?

By: y6y6y6

y6y6y6 — Wed, 02 Jun 2004 13:39:13 -0800

"Why aren't there any gases with nutritional value?"

Assumes facts not in evidence. Most of the non-noble (inert) gases are pretty much the basis for all nutrition. Try running your body without hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, fluorine, and chlorine.

You may not think about these as required nutrients because we've evolved to live in a soup of them. You get what you need just by breathing. Plus most things you're more likely to think of as nutrients are made largely from hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen.

So it would be just as accurate to ask why water has no nutritional value. The answer being that word games make for bad science questions.

By: MrMoonPie

MrMoonPie — Wed, 02 Jun 2004 13:42:25 -0800

milovoo, I've had a meal similar to the one in that article, complete with "Watermelon Air." I don't think it had much nutritional value, though.

By: Capn

Capn — Wed, 02 Jun 2004 13:57:10 -0800

> Is there anything higher than bacteria that can?

Plants use energy from Mr Sun to break Carbon Dioxide down. The carbon, along with hydrogen from water become carbohydrates, which is basically what plants are made out of.
The Capn is not a chemist, or biologist, this is not legal advice)

By: shoos

shoos — Wed, 02 Jun 2004 14:15:34 -0800

Given the temperature of the planet, there also aren't that many different gases in the atmosphere in significant amounts. Nowhere close to the number of different solids on the ground.

By: DevilsAdvocate

DevilsAdvocate — Wed, 02 Jun 2004 14:28:20 -0800

Most compounds which are required for human life are complex compounds: carbohydrates, proteins, fats, vitamins, all have dozens (if not hundreds or thousands) of atoms per molecule. Compounds with this many atoms tend not to be gases, at temperatures and pressures that we're familiar with. Gases (at common temperatures and pressures) generally have only a few atoms per molecule. (The reverse is not necessarily true; just because a compound has only a few atoms per molecule, does not necessarily make it a gas.)

This explains why the vast majority of nutrients are not gases; they are too complex. A few others (especially minerals) fall in the category of having only a few atoms per molecule, but not being gases. The lone remaining compound required for human life is oxygen, which, as others have noted above, arguably does have nutritional value.

Try running your body without hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, fluorine, and chlorine.

Oxygen, yes. But I can run my body just fine without hydrogen gas, nitrogen gas, fluorine gas, and chlorine gas. Granted, I require compounds containing hydrogen atoms, compounds containing nitrogen atoms, compounds containing fluorine atoms, and compounds containing chlorine atoms, but those are very different things from the gases. In fact, I cannot make use of hydrogen gas or nitrogen gas, and fluorine and chlorine gases are downright harmful.

You may not think about these as required nutrients because we've evolved to live in a soup of them. You get what you need just by breathing.

You get the oxygen you need by breathing. You don't get nitrogen by breathing, because we can't break down nitrogen gas. We rely on other organisms which can break it down and incorporate the nitrogen into compounds which we can use. And we definitely don't get hydrogen, chlorine, or fluorine by breathing, as there essentially isn't any of these gases in earth's atmosphere.

By: milovoo

milovoo — Wed, 02 Jun 2004 14:31:49 -0800

The answer being that word games make for bad science questions.

I figured the question could be interpreted as "Is there any substance that is naturally in a gaseous state that has nutritional value?" or "Why do all items that are considered food come in a solid or liquid form?". The question of whether it is possible to digest or absorb nutrients from a gas seems like an interesting one, albeit one dependent on the differences between digestion and respiration.

randomly found while considering this question - NASA found complex sugars in space

By: bonehead

bonehead — Wed, 02 Jun 2004 14:48:25 -0800

DevilsAdvocate has most of the answer---anything with "nutritional value", sugars, salts, proteins or fats is far to heavy, or the wrong type of compound to have much chance of being a vapor at ambient temperatures (in science-talk we call it low vapor pressure). In addition, gases are so low in density, about a thousand times less stuff per volume, that any nutritional value of a gas would be too small to matter.

Of course, there's always plants, but carbon dioxide uptake is usually considered a kind of respiration, as I understand it.

Huge numbers of free molecules have been found in interstellar space, so much so that some people think that life may have originated there...

By: falconred

falconred — Wed, 02 Jun 2004 15:33:48 -0800

I think the real answer is along the lines of "because lipids (fats), carbohydrates, and proteins are all solid or liquid at temperatures our bodies live in".

By: Orange Goblin

Orange Goblin — Wed, 02 Jun 2004 15:48:31 -0800

"Why do all items that are considered food come in a solid or liquid form?" is probably what the question should have been. I want food I can spray in my mouth, dammit!

By: thomcatspike

thomcatspike — Wed, 02 Jun 2004 15:57:40 -0800

I want food I can spray in my mouth, dammit!
H20?

By: five fresh fish

five fresh fish — Wed, 02 Jun 2004 16:03:38 -0800

[prepares to regurgitate food; lips pursed for spraying it]

By: thomcatspike

thomcatspike — Wed, 02 Jun 2004 16:17:29 -0800

Wait, gases would go up your nose, not down the throat. Imagine your food would tickle on its way through your system.

By: shoos

shoos — Wed, 02 Jun 2004 18:06:23 -0800

Orange Goblin, you can spray food in your mouth. You just need a blender and high-power atomizer. Strictly speaking not gas, but sprayable.

By: gramcracker

gramcracker — Wed, 02 Jun 2004 18:19:34 -0800

Oxygen at extremely high doses is toxic. So yes, it should be regulated as a drug.

By: LittleMissCranky

LittleMissCranky — Wed, 02 Jun 2004 18:22:49 -0800

To elaborate on DevilsAdvocate's point:

The energy in a substance is largely stored in chemical bonds. Your body accesses the energy by breaking these bonds. While different bonds have different levels of energy, things with few bonds generally store a lot less energy than things with a lot of bonds. The more bonds a molecule has, the heavier it is, and the less likely it is to exist in a gaseous state at standard temperature and pressure.

That said, there are many gasses that, at least from a chemical standpoint, store appreciable energy. Methane (CH4) and ethane (C2H6) come to mind. These compounds have a couple of bonds to break and have some oxidation potential (in other words, hydrogen to lose), both of which are pretty decent indicators of energy. In fact, they are very similar to the ends of fatty acid chains in our bodies. If you could manage to consume them (which I really wouldn't recommend) and digest them, they would give you a little bit of energy. You'd have to consume a whole lot of gas, though, to get any caloric benefit -- remember that the molecules in a gas are much, much less densely packed than in a liquid or solid -- but from a chemical standpoint, it could be done.

By: LittleMissCranky

LittleMissCranky — Wed, 02 Jun 2004 18:23:55 -0800

Oxygen at extremely high doses is toxic. So yes, it should be regulated as a drug.

Can you think of anything that's NOT toxic at extremely high doses?

By: falconred

falconred — Wed, 02 Jun 2004 18:32:05 -0800

Can you think of anything that's NOT toxic at extremely high doses?

LittleMissCranky's sweet sweet lovin'?

By: troutfishing

troutfishing — Wed, 02 Jun 2004 19:22:28 -0800

I don't know.

Maybe, at extremely high doses - as with Oxygen - it causes things to burst into flame and burn uncontrollably.

Next ?

By: DevilsAdvocate

DevilsAdvocate — Wed, 02 Jun 2004 19:49:59 -0800

But in a good way.

By: LittleMissCranky

LittleMissCranky — Wed, 02 Jun 2004 20:49:26 -0800

Oh, so many men have made exactly that mistake.