this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2024
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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month 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.