It’s Cheaper than Budweiser

It’s a crap shoot around here, isn’t it? I mean, sometimes you’ll fire up your browser window, navigate on over here, and find the most boring drivel you can think of. Sometimes I’m trying to be funny, sometimes serious, and other times not even I know what I’m doing.

Even still, it may come as a bit of a surprise to you that I’ve spent a good portion of my late morning reading lots and lots of websites about urine. I’m not entirely sure where this came from. I know that yesterday, somewhere, I heard that Aron Ralston¹ had to drink his own urine to survive. My initial reaction, as you might expect, was “ew”. Today I saw some reference to urine-drinking in a FARK thread and my curiosity piqued. What follows is way, way more information about drinking your own urine than you ever wanted to know, and hopefully considerably more than you’ll ever need.

Just so that we’re all clear on the basic facts of the issue, for the average healthy person, urine is, indeed, sterile when it leaves your body². Then again, lots and lots of things that we do not consume are sterile.

In times past as well as today in certain foreign cultures, lots of people do things with urine (including drinking it) that most of us here in the west would find mildly distrubing, to say the very least. From drinking it for health reasons to using it as a teeth whitener³, if you can dream it, you can do it.

But the lingering question in my mind is this: can you actually do that? Make no mistake, I do not want to drink my own urine, and I don’t think I would survive a situation that required it, but… inquiring minds want to know!

The internet is full of people who seem to know everything about pee. Unsurprisingly, they all disagree on what can safely be done with it. But what’s IN a healthy person’s urine, anyway? Well, some scientist in Singapore has us covered. So it looks like (if I’m reading that correctly) it’s mainly water and urea, with some other stuff along the way. One common misconception that I’ve seen a lot in my research is that urine contains ammonia. Wikipedia tells me that urea is formed to neutralize ammonia⁴, so I doubt there’d be a whole lot of it left. Another concern is the acidity, I suppose. Fortunately, urine is no more acidic than tomato juice (if I remember my high school chemistry class pH scale correctly), so that seems to be okay.

I have seen nothing (aside from pure speculation) that suggests that the urine from a healthy person is toxic. The logic saying that it is usually goes something like “Well, if it was that good for you, would you be releasing it as waste?” Which is convincing for me, but not really “scientific”. Just because something is not helpful to you doesn’t mean it’s harmful. “You’re either with us or you’re with the terrorists” is no more convincing to your liver than it is to terrorist sympathizers.

After a bit of reading, I have come to the conclusion that urine is disgusting and I would advocate that you never do anything with it besides “flush”. But I’m not seeing a lot suggesting that it’s going to harm you if you drink it.

To leave you with a pretty image, here’s a selection from The Skeptic’s Dictionary:

Urine therapy refers to one of several uses of urine to prevent or cure sickness, to enhance beauty or to cleanse one’s bowels. Most devotees drink the midstream of their morning urine. Some prefer it straight and steaming hot; others mix it with juice or serve it over fruit. Some prefer a couple of urine drops mixed with a tablespoon of water applied sublingually several times a day. Some wash themselves in their own golden fluid to improve their skin quality. Many modern Japanese women are said to engage in urine bathing. The truly daring use their own urine as an enema. Urine is not quite the breakfast of champions, but it is the elixir of choice of a number of holy men in India where drinking urine has been practiced for thousands of years.

Here are some more links for reference, just in case you’re not satisfied:

• How to drink your urine to survive - Provides a how-to for filtering your urine in case you’re ever trapped on a desert island… and have access to the internet.
• Yearning to drink my urine - Safe? - A Columbia advice column weighs in on this disturbing topic.
• Will drinking my own urine cure me? - Yahoo Answers doesn’t always have experts on hand, but some of the responses are funny.
• Urine, Urea, and Urine Therapy - all from Wikipedia

So, in conclusion… Ew.

1. That’s the guy who got his arm trapped by a boulder and had to amputate it to survive.

2. Med Help International.

3. Drinking Urine — Wikipedia.

4. Urea — Wikipedia.