Experimenting With Stomach Acid | How strong Is It?

and so this is fully fully concentrated let's get a little more in there welcome to the anatomy lab everyone today we're going to talk about stomach acid or what we like to call hydrochloric acid so why does our body produce this stuff or in other words what is its function and how powerful is it you may have heard of chemistry lab accidents where people have burned themselves with hydrochloric acid and also heard of body conditions where stomach acid gets in places that it's not supposed to and causes some problems so we need to do some experiments with this hydrochloric acid to help us answer some of these questions and of course yes we are the anatomy lab so we will utilize a real human stomach to also help us with this journey so let's do this so let's first start with the what and the why what specifically inside the stomach produces the acid and why does it produce it so let's take a look at our first dissection here this is a real human stomach and the stomach was removed from the left upper quadrant of the abdomen or left upper abdomen where the stomach resides and there's a couple of associated structures that we can mention here's the bottom part of the esophagus that we cut here and again that esophagus would continue up towards the throat if we came down on the other side of the stomach this smaller tubing is where the stomach essentially becomes the small intestine so from here to here is the stomach this hollow bag that helps store and mix food and obviously create some hydrochloric acid now this stomach or this particular dissection has not been cut into and to fully appreciate the stomach acid and what creates it we have to look at the inside lining of the stomach so we have another stomach dissection here that i'm going to overlay from on this other stomach you can see it's a little more stretched a little larger especially up at the fundus or upper portion of the stomach but we've cut right about here if we just compare it to the stomach and the cool thing about cutting into this is we can see how amazing the inside lining of the stomach looks these folds are so awesome they're called gastric rugi gastric juice means stomach rugi just means fold and these gastric rugi help the stomach to expand when you decide to eat too much like a big in and out burger meal which we'll talk about later in the video but something else if we were to zoom into this inside lining which just keep in mind the inside lining has a name called the tunica mucosa mucosa just means it's referring to mucus which is gonna come up again in this story a little bit later but if we were to zoom in and zoom into that tunic mucosa we'd see some other folds that were going in the other direction that were inward and those folds create what we call gastric glands now those gastric glands are lined with a couple of different cell types one specific cell type are called parietal cells you might have guessed it those parietal cells are in charge of creating and secreting hydrochloric acid so what is stomach acid or in other words this hydrochloric acid do well it's obviously acidic in nature and one of the things it does is help with the initial stages of denaturing proteins is what we say denaturing proteins is essentially saying we're starting to break down proteins that you've ingested in your diet another thing that the hydrochloric acid does is it helps kill microbes or foreign invaders certain viruses maybe some bacteria they don't like that acidic environment and it helps kill some of those invaders or pathogens now keep in mind we do know there are some pathogens that have evolved the ability to live in an acidic environment and obviously create infection in the digestive tract of humans but many of the pathogens that we ingest can get annihilated by that acid one other thing the acid does is it helps to activate other substances that the stomach secretes for example there's a substance called pepsinogen that's secreted by other cells in those gastric glands called chief cells pepsinogen when it hits its acid environment or gets i guess introduced into in an acid environment it gets converted from pepsinogen to pepsin and pepsin is an enzyme that helps break down proteins so we're getting a lot of this initial breakdown of proteins because of this acidic environment in the hydrochloric acid but how powerful is this acid well if we're talking about ph when the hydrochloric acid is initially secreted from those parietal cells it can have a ph as low as 0.8 now remember go back to your biology or chemistry class our ph scale goes from zero to fourteen with seven being considered neutral anything above seven we consider it alkaline or a base anything below a ph of seven we consider it acidic so if we're down to 0.8 we're pretty low on that acid-base scale or that ph scale and the reality is is once that stomach acid gets mixed with some of the other secretions in the stomach the ph changes from anywhere from one to three you'll have this range of one to three and a lot of people will just settle on it's a ph of two but why is there a range of one to three well one i already mentioned because of those secretions that can kind of dilute the initial acid of 0.8 or that hydrochloric acid being at 0.8 but also food and intake of food will dictate acid production so when you eat food the stomach gets stimulated stimulated to produce acid and there are also certain types of food that tend to create more acid say than other types of foods that you may eat so you might be thinking why doesn't this stomach eat itself alive with the acid it produces well remember the name of the inside lining it's called the tunica mucosa because it doesn't just secrete acid from the cells in here it also secretes a whole bunch of mucus and we talk about protection think about this hand being the inside lining of the stomach then we get this protective layer of mucus and then we get the acid on top of it and that mucus protects the stomach lining itself from say digestive enzymes and the acid itself so we can see that the stomach has created a protective mechanism to help protect itself from acid but what happens if acid gets on other structures that aren't necessarily meant to deal with acid for example like the esophagus that we showed earlier here if acid gets on the inside lining of the esophagus or if somebody's vomiting a whole bunch and acid gets on the teeth or what about a really extreme example if somebody would have a full ulceration of the stomach and that acid were able to escape and get on organs throughout the abdominal cavity are we dealing with like a sigourney weaver type aliens movie where their blood is so acidic it just goes through everything it touches or is it going to be a little bit less of an extreme example well we're going to find out that not all hydrochloric acid is created equal and that's why we're going to start our little experiments so we are in the secret back room of our anatomy lab never before seen on a youtube video and besides keeping secrets of anatomical awesomeness back here we also have a fume hood so if you're hearing a whooshing noise in the audio it's probably the fume hood circulating air so that i don't have to breathe in noxious hydrochloric acid during our experiments but let me introduce you to the players of our experiment here so we have a baby blue large nitrile glove here i'll mention why that's part of this in just a second then we have a double double from in and out no pickles or onions because that would be disgusting and then we also have a human stomach that's turned inside out here back here i've got 500 milliliters of distilled water that we're going to use to dilute the hydrochloric acid here and then we've got a graduated cylinder and some droppers to help us with that but let me talk a little bit more about this hydrochloric acid here and why we're kind of doing this experiment there's this idea that this hydrochloric acid burns through everything but not all hydrochloric acid is created equal but specifically the hydrochloric acid in this bottle is what we call a 12 molar solution for those of you who've taken chemistry you know that is highly concentrated if you've never taken chemistry that's okay i'll give you a little bit of a crash course here on what is moles or molarity things of that nature and a mole of a substance essentially measures how many particles or atoms or molecules are in that substance and it's a constant number so one mole of a substance is 6.02 times 10 to the 23rd that is a huge number and this is a 12 molar solution in hydrochloric acid so hydrochloric acids made of hydrogen and chloride and when it gets poured into water it disassociates and we really focus on those hydrogen ions because hydrogen is really what creates the acidity so if i had just one mole or one molar solution of hydrochloric acid i'd assume that i'd have 6.02 times 10 to the 23rd hydrogen ions in a liter now multiply that by 12 and that's what i've got here with a 12 molar solution pretty crazy this stuff came with a safety sheet if it gets on my skin it's going to burn my skin if i breathe in it can burn my respiratory tract eyes all sorts of safety precautions hence i'm dressed up in safety goggles my old high school lab coat that doesn't fit me anymore and then some gloves here but we need to actually make this the same concentration as stomach acid stomach acid has a concentration of 0.155 molarity so if you didn't care about all those numbers just going from 12 to 0.15 at least should impress you a little bit as far as how concentrated this is compared to stomach acid it's a 77 times difference so pretty crazy so we need to figure out how many milliliters of this i need to put in the water to make us our pseudostomach acid so we're going to do that right now and then start dropping this acid on some of our experimental items here okay so some quick math so we can figure out how much of that 12 molar hydrochloric acid i need to mix in with that water to create our pseudo stomach acid if you hate math i won't be offended if you skip ahead to the next chapter but if you bear with me for a few seconds it might help you kind of get this idea of how concentrated that is compared to our stomach acid we're going to create so we know what we need we need a .155 molar solution or moles of the stomach acid that's molarity of the stomach acid but we have a 12 molar solution 77 times greater than this essentially in that hydrochloric acid that i bought from the lab supply store you can also write this as 12 moles per liter that's kind of this is kind of the shorthand form of that here so if we come here i can use this as a conversion factor to do our math so we can do this and i can actually do 1 liter over 12 moles so those moles will cancel out but i know this is going to be a small number and i want to convert it to milliliters because that's the amount of fluid i'll be working with back there so i'm going to add another conversion we know there's a thousand milliliters in one liter so the liters are going to cancel out the moles are going to cancel out and that's going to give me a number in milliliters and we're essentially talking about 12.92 milliliters that i need of this to mix into a liter of water now the only problem is i only have 500 milliliters back there but that's pretty easy i just divide this by two and i'm essentially going to deal with 6.4 ish i think it's like 6.46 milliliters of water that will mix in to create our stomach acid so let's do it okay so let's set this up here we've got our graduated cylinder here and our beaker of distilled water and let's get a dropper here and maybe lower this down just a little bit and then i'll take the lid off of here fume away if you hood so remember from our calculations i'm going to need about 6.4 milliliters of the hydrochloric acid here to dilute in that water there about just about two there we'll do let's get the lid back on just in case don't want to have a spill here and then we'll go ahead and mix this in and we have just created stomach acid okay so now with our pseudostomach acid let's drop it on some things and see if you know an aliens type reaction happen where just burns right through everything logically most of you are probably like it's not going to do it but let's find out so we'll start with the in-n-out burger let's bring it really close here yes digest digest yeah it looks like i'm just pouring water on it okay now i have to say something about this next part you guys i know the outcome of this and so i feel comfortable doing this if i thought this was gonna burn a hole through the donor stomach i would not be doing this but to prove that just a small exposure to hydrochloric acid that is at the same concentration and ph of the stomach even with no protective mucus isn't going to do anything crazy to the stomach if i got this on my skin right here i don't think it would do much either i probably shouldn't do it since we're trying to perpetuate smart things in education but guaranteed i'd be fine if that dropped on my my skin might be a little irritated but i could easily wipe it off nowhere near compared to if i dumped this on me now speaking of this all these safety protocols the thing that i've been the most nervous about with all this is if i got any on my hands or on my skin because i figured you know i could be pretty good with like keeping my forearms protected my eyes protected but i figured that some might get on my gloves so i just want to know if this glove will hold up at least for a few seconds with some hydrochloric acid that's fully concentrated and where's my dropper it's right here so we're gonna do that what do you guys think is it gonna burn right through the glove just like on aliens let's find out here okay can you see that okay here we go drop drop drop yeah it doesn't even care you guys can see that [Music] no compromise of the glove i do not have a false sense of security anymore now that i'm going to try to put highly concentrated hydrochloric acid on my own fingers here but last thing i'm going to do you guys just for fun and i'll show this at the end of the video i am going to put a piece of the burger oh i can hear some fizzing can you guys hear that [Music] it's fizzing it's making a noise it's gonna eat through the tray i don't think it'll eat through the tray but here's what we're gonna do i'm gonna put some meat in this and let it sit for a while and see what it looks like in the morning and we'll let you guys take a look at that and so this is fully fully concentrated let's get a little more in there with the dropper false and security okay we're gonna see what that does to this over time so this is after 15 minutes of soaking this one on the left is the concentrated hydrochloric acid you can see it's got the pink looking hue to it and the meat's starting to turn black where the one on the right which is our same concentration as human stomach acid doesn't look like it's had much of a change and if we look from the top you can see kind of just looks like a soggy piece of meat on this side when we go over to the concentrated side it's starting to turn black over there definitely a difference so at 30 minutes this is looking more pink like it's gonna try to break this thing down this looks about the same from the top again we can see it kind of just looks like a soggy burger this one looks like it's gonna try to dissolve this burger okay so this is after an hour and still see the changes happening in the concentrated acid not much of a change in the stomach acid side here oh my goodness after four hours take a look at that concentrated hydrochloric acid the meat's almost fully dissolved compared to our stomach acid mixture not much of a dissolved piece of meat in there so don't count on your stomach acid to just dissolve things or does it digest things fully on its own but we knew that there's a lot of other digestive enzymes and things that help with the digestive process but take a look at this here from the top again not much of a change almost fully dissolved in there so i may have let the concentrated hydrochloric acid sit over the weekend so that meat's been soaking in there for over two days should take a look at it here a little corrosion there so that's what concentrated hydrochloric acid does to me dissolves it kind of like a less hollywood version of alien blood so now that we've completed that anticlimactic experiment at least we know that stomach acid if it gets on other structures throughout the human body it's not just going to burn a hole through those structures and again that makes sense there's no need for something that potent in the human body like 12 molar hydrochloric acid we just need stomach acid to be acidic enough to kill pathogens or microbes that make it in with the food to activate those enzymes we mentioned earlier and to start denaturing the proteins or breaking those down as part of the digestive process now many of us have probably experienced situations where say maybe some acid in that stomach that we've been talking about this whole video would actually regurgitate up into the esophagus and get an area where it's not necessarily supposed to be as the esophagus doesn't produce as much mucus now one bout we tend to get irritative symptoms like heartburn and that's typically what we call it however if somebody experiences stomach acid getting on the esophagus chronically or over and over and over again over time then the stomach acid can cause some erosions and some people can get a complication of heartburn or gerd called barrett's esophagus now another example might be if somebody were vomiting continuously or frequently say through like an eating disorder like bulimia constant exposure or frequent exposure of the teeth to that stomach acid can start to erode the teeth now most of the time like i've already mentioned one or a few times or occasional bouts of exposure to stomach acid in the esophagus or the teeth isn't going to cause a major problem or a long-term problem but remember i mentioned maybe an extreme example earlier in the video what if somebody had peptic ulcer disease and there was an ulceration or an erosion in the stomach that got so bad that it caused a perforation or a hole all the way through the stomach now you're going to have some other problems that we're really concerned about like oh there's a hole in your stomach with associated bleeding and immense pain but in theory yes that stomach acid could then diffuse throughout the abdominal cavity would it burn a hole through an organ immediately no but again we'd get some irritation of those surrounding tissues and surrounding structures but in that case they tend to treat it most of the time as a medical emergency because again you've got a hole in your stomach so there's more than just worrying about your stomach acid escaping there's this hole in bleeding in your stomach so hopefully that helps you put everything together as far as the function of stomach acid as well as its potency but keep in mind stomach acid is just one part of the digestive system story we didn't even get into talking about the enzymes that are released further downstream say like by the pancreas to help aid in digestion the bile released by the gallbladder and the liver and one thing that we could not simulate in our little experiment was just this amazing muscular blender that the stomach is that it can actually churn and mix the food with the stomach acid and the other enzymes to help mix that food so that you can digest that double double from in and out again no pickles or onions or whatever it is you like to eat thanks for watching everyone jeffrey the skeleton is constantly on my gluteus maximus reminding me that i'm very bad at these shameless plugs and wants me to remind you there are multiple ways to support our channel you can like ring the bell leave a comment and subscribe if you feel the need and even take a look at some of our snazzy merchandise you might have seen the artwork in the background throughout the video and these amazing institute of human anatomy t-shirts jeffrey's constantly trying to get me to get him a t-shirt however he looks way better naked us on the other hand we should probably close our nakedness so we'll put the link below go ahead and check it out if you feel the need and we'll see in the next video [Music] you

Channel: Institute of Human Anatomy

Views: 7,024,161

Keywords: stomach acid, acid, hydrochloric acid on skin, hydrochloric acid, stomach, acid digesting, stomach acid digesting food, can the stomach eat itself, peptic ulcer, stomach ulcer, duodenal ulcer, peptic ulcer disease, gastric rugae, chief cells, parietal cells, parietal cell stomach, gastric glands, tunica mucosa, stomach acid vs food, hydrochloric acid vs food, acid vs food, acid vs burger, can stomach acid burn skin, barretts esophagus, human anatomy, anatomy, ioha, fume hood

Id: 2KptKfFC5Jk

Length: 22min 7sec (1327 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 11 2021