this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2024
696 points (97.2% liked)

Funny

6675 readers
99 users here now

General rules:

Exceptions may be made at the discretion of the mods.

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

Neither of those acids should have systemic toxicity. You'd need a lot of phosphate to get sick(around 60 grams is fatal and 4 grams is the recommended upper limit), and it is not absorbed very well in the first place (and just leads to diarrhea). Citrate, similar to phosphate, can cause hypocalcemia but you really would have to ingest a lot of it. Both much prefer being calcium salts instead of sodium salts. Usually it's for neutralization more than anything.

On the point of methanol: the treatment with ethanol is both to give much more ethanol than you have serum methanol and to rely on ethanol being a better binder. Methanol itself isn't what's toxic, it's the fact that alcohol dehydrogenase metabolizes it into toxic formaldehyde much faster than your body is able to clear it.