Can You Drink Your Own Urine? | Drinking Urine is Good?

What is Urine?

Before you drink urine, you might want to consider what’s in urine. Urine is the compounds – over 3,000 – that are flushed out of a person’s system. Each person has unique urine because it depends on what you put in your body and your overall health.

A few things found in urine include:

• Sodium
• Urea
• Nitrogen
• Potassium
• Creatine
• Hormones
• Ammonia  

Can you drink your own Urine?

The short answer to the question is yes, but it’s not recommended in most cases. While some cultures and websites tell you that urine can magically cure all kinds of ailments, most medical experts disagree with this idea. In fact, the U.S. Army Field Manual tells members to not drink their own urine, along with blood and seawater.

Despite the general recommendations NOT to drink your own pee, the reality is that you can do is in survival scenarios as a last-ditch effort to survive. The negative to that is you won’t be able to survive for long doing so.

Urine can be a short-term solution, but drinking urine for extended times is a bad idea. You have to remember the job of your kidneys. Your kidneys filter out waste products from your body, sending them out as urine. So, Urine is 95% water, which sounds great when you’re dehydrated and literally dying, but what’s in the remaining 5% can be harmful. In fact, it can kill you in slow ways.

Prolonged consumption of urine sends it through your kidneys over and over again, creating more concentrated versions. If you’re dehydrated, your kidneys won’t be able to handle these minerals and toxins in such concentrated amounts. Not only do you risk a possible bacterial infection, but you can severely damage your kidneys.

What are the Causes of Drinking Urine?

Let’s take a look at what could happen if you decide to drink urine multiple times.

Dehydration

While drinking urine one time might make you feel less dehydrated, drinking urine is like drinking seawater due to the high sodium levels. Sodium makes dehydration worse.

Infection

As you continue to reintroduce bacteria over and over again into your body, they will start to grow faster, creating an infection in your body. You might end up with an infection in your mouth, stomach, or throat.

Kidney Failure

The largest problem is that drinking urine can cause kidney damage, and you can’t fix kidney damage. Once your kidneys are damaged, little reverse the problem, and this can be a lifetime issue.

Upset Stomach

Drinking urine can cause vomiting, queasiness, diarrhea, and a general feeling of being sick. Plus, you’ll have a general yucky feeling about drinking urine, to begin with; that’s a mental hurdle to conquer.

Heart Attack

Urine has high levels of potassium, which can cause a heart attack. Even if you’re an otherwise healthy adult, excessive levels of potassium

What will happen if you accidentally swallow urine?

Don’t worry, you’re not going to die or anything. Urine consists out of water and urea and other substances.

The worst that would happen is that you might get a bad, slightly salty taste in your mouth which would quickly dissipate, and perhaps the next time you pee yourself it might be slightly (but not noticeably) more concentrated as you excreted a little more urea than normal.

A hundred years ago or more doctors intentionally dipped their fingers in urine and tasted it as part of the diagnostic process.