Do you love to drink pee?
-“Duh.”
In my perfectly coddled world of blissful ignorance, I’d like to believe that no one has to ingest their own piss, ever. But what if we’re stranded like Joe Dirt and try survive Grylls style? Is the tinkle drinking adventurer trustworthy enough for us to follow his leaky lead?
Also, there’s that compartmentalized closet in the bowels of my brain reserved for the gag fuel that was that one episode of “My Strange Addiction”. Why do they do this? Should we too, sip from a catheter like a dairy queen milkshake? Reroute our toilet pipes to the water fountain?
(getting nauseated just joking about this…)
Whatever the nature surrounding your recreational libations may be, a recent Loyola study may make you reconsider if piddle’s part of your diet plan. According to their work, although our pee is mostly water, it’s not necessarily sterile as we once thought. Samples in the study showed bacteria and toxins in the fluid. For folks stranded in a survival sitch, the idea of not drying up like the wicked witch makes the quasi toxic kidney juice worth the squeeze.
Plus…
Electrolytes aid in conducting electrical impulses between cells. We keep hydrated, a proper blood pH, and functional muscles because of them. But too much ain’t so good. That means, if you’re Joe Schmoe living in the suburbs, you’re probably getting enough from diet alone. By guzzling supplemenal bladder lemonade, you can eff up the sodium and potassium ion levels.
Too much of the former sucks the water outta you, while too much of the latter makes your heart throw up its middle finger, throw down its TPS reports, and throw in the towel.
Ya know, I hope I’m preaching to a pee-free choir here.
But as I saw this study trending in the science community, I figured it was at least important because of the takeaway: urine is not sterile. Clearly, Dr. Jesuit & Co. aren’t getting stoned in the lab and running tests on whether excrement’s just hogwash jargon for “leftovers”.
No. What this study actually means is that they have to reanalyze e’rything they thought they knew about our pee. For the normal non-sci guy reading this, you’re probably thinking “Okay. I didn’t know they ever thought it was sterile.” Yep. For a good 50 years. And now that they know it’s not, that means rewriting a lot of “facts” about disorders linked to toilet time – like overactive bladder diseases.
Researcher Evann Hilt says, “We need to reassess everything we think we know about urine.” Also, among bacteria found in the urine of completely healthy subjects were the kind that cause UTI’s and heart infections. Hilt adds:
“We don’t know if they’re a consequence of overactive bladder or if they are a cause of overactive bladder. We still have to perform more studies. We want to know who is good, who is bad, how they interact with one another and how they interact with the host”
Yet again, science proves itself wrong.
(Either that, or Big Pharma just paid researchers to create a problem it can fix with a prescription solution).
(Fair enough.)
In sum: don’t sip piss for funsies or go wee in the pool, always question “facts”, and if you’re stuck in the desert sans dihydrogen monoxide – do what you gotta do. I mean, If you pass out from dehydration, how are you possibly going to have the wherewithal to hack off your calf, grapple your way out of a cave, and head to hospital?
So, just do it. But only if “urine” a pinch.