8/13/2019 Drinking Urine

1/3

Drinking UrineDoes The Secret To Health Lie In Things Like Yellow Snow?

Patrick Owen

Like

Like

99

Industrial urea is produced by the millions of tons but

if sources become scarce one day, your urine will

literally be worth gold.

12Page 1 of 2

Thats horrible. Theres no getting away from it. Its warm and

pretty salty.

-Bear Grylls, survivorman

Eating yellow snow is something your mom told you never to do.

But what would happen if you did? What if you were stuck in a

survival situation? Is urine bad for you? Is it toxic? Is it

fattening?

Why is urine yellow?In the Middle Ages, some European alchemists thought urinewas

yellow because it contained gold. This led to fruitless, and

probably disgusting, efforts to extract the precious mineral. The

8/13/2019 Drinking Urine

2/3

yellow color in urine is actually the same yellow you see on

bruises, and what also makes your feces brown. Bilirubin is a

product of old red blood cells that is partly broken down in the

liver and stored in the gall bladder. Most of it is released into our

intestines and broken down further, causing our poo to have itshue. Some remains in the bloodstream and is converted to urobilin

by the kidneys, and this is what gives our flush its blush.

Whats in your pee?Urine is composed of about 95% water and 5% nitrogenous waste

from protein breakdown. Nitrogen from protein degradation forms

ammonia, a compound so toxic that only a tiny bit can be tolerated.So our livers quickly convert any ammonia in our bloodstream to

urea, which in turn is removed by the kidneys and concentrated in

our urine. Urea makes up only 2% of our urine, and the nitrogen it

contains can be used to fertilize plants. Industrial urea is produced

by the millions of tons, but if sources become scarce one day, your

urine will literally be worth gold.

And if you need to protect your liquid wealth, you can always

make gunpowder out of your pee. Urea can be broken back down

into ammonia, producing that rank pee smell of back-alley

dumpsters, and further oxidized by bacteria to make urea nitrate,

an essential ingredient in high explosives. Urine also contains a bit

of creatinine, a breakdown product of creatine phosphate found in

muscles that is used by urologists professional pee doctors to

assess proper kidney function. The rest of your urine is made up of

mineral salts, enzymes, fatty acids, carbohydrates, and hormones

basically the stuff primordial soups are made of.

The art of drinking UrineAccording to the official Xinhua news agency, more than three

million Chinese drink their own urine in the belief that it is good

8/13/2019 Drinking Urine

3/3

for their health. Some modern Japanese women admit to engaging

in urine bathing, and the truly daring use their own urine as an

enema. Drinking ones morning urine is a traditional practice of

the yogic religion that is still widely performed today. In the West,

the practice is called urine therapy, and a growing number ofnaturopaths and other advocates of alternative medicine are

promoting it as a miracle cure-all. Madonna once told David

Letterman that she pees on her own feet to treat her athletes foot

problem. Mixed Martial Arts fighters Lyoto Machida and Luke

Cummo admitted to drinking their own pee, as did boxer Juan

Manuel Mrquez, believing that it improved their health.