why we breathe air.

For thousands of years people
did not know why we
breathe air. Plato and Aristotle
believed that nutrients from
food were burned in the heart, making the flame that brought warmth and life to
... the body. They thought that
the air that we breathe helped
to keep the fire controlled.

Oxygen was discovered to be
a chemical element, and vital
in breathing, by 18th century
scientists such as Joseph
Priestley, Carl Wilhelm Scheele
and Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier . It was Lavoisier, who is regarded as the
founder of modern chemistry,
who named oxygen.

Oxygen is necessary for the
chemical reactions inside a cell.
(The word oxygen is from the
Greek meaning acid burning.)
These cellular inspirations
break up nutrients from food and set free the energy for
driving the cell’s life process.
A pretty important process
considering you breathe up to
23,000 times a day.