Facts baby :)
Comment on It's OK to just like lemon water.
Ephera@lemmy.ml 8 hours agoShe did the math (with some assumptions), but basically 0.25 mL of lemon juice will turn 500 mL of alkaline water into neutral water:
Image This is in the video at 13:16.
The reason is that pH is a logarithmic scale. Alkaline water has a pH of about 8, whereas lemon acid is at 2. That means lemon acid has 1,000,000 times more hydrogen atoms.
Lemon juice isn’t pure lemon acid, so that’s why you do still need 0.25 mL (rather than just a millionth of 500 mL).
Nanook@lemmy.zip 8 hours ago
lvxferre@mander.xyz 5 hours ago
0.25 mL of lemon juice is probably too much already.
She’s doing the maths for the concentration of citric acid in lemon juice through the formula C(acid) = 10^(-pH). That works fine for a strong acid, because you can be pretty sure all that acid in the solution is dissociated, and thus lowering its pH… but citric acid is weak - and weak acids don’t dissociate properly in already acidic conditions.
This means there’s probably way more acid in that solution than the pH makes you believe, but that acid will react once you raise the pH, by mixing the lemon juice into the water.
(I don’t blame her for using the strong acid maths. It’s already enough to convey her point, plus the maths for weak acids is a bloody pain.)