The Health Implications Of Drinking Urine

Drinking urine is an old tradition. The reason is different for different folks. The major reason is to improve health or lack of available water. Very few claim spiritual effect. But what do scientists say about such acts? How safe is drinking urine?

Urine

Content Of Urine

Before we find out the dangers and or benefits of drinking urine, let us first see what it contains. Urine of a healthy person is waste that the body no longer needs. The vehicle is water. The constituents of urine in a day are 28g of urea, 10g of electrolytes, 3g of phosphate and other organic acids, 1.5g of creatine, 1g of uric acid and about 80mg of protein. Others are hormones, antibodies and vitamins but not in significant quantities to elicit positive responses.

For a sick person, the value may change but only a little. Some of the components will increase or decrease. However, a sick person that is battling an infection may produce some microorganisms in the urine.

Benefits Or Risk

Looking at the components, there are no health benefits of drinking urine. Drinking it overtime can cause accumulation of some of these components which can cause health challenges to the user. Also, drinking urine from an infected person can cause infection or reinfection if the owner is drinking the urine.

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Another danger of drinking urine is poisoning. The food we eat and water we drink can contain poison the body removes from the body. Some are removed along with urine. Such waste can cause some damage when the urine is consumed.

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A very good example is drugs that are excreted from the body as urine either as unchanged or after conversion. Drinking it can cause toxic levels of the drug to be consumed by the owner of the urine or ingesting the wrong drug. Such action can cause drug related complications. There was a story when I was a young kid how soldiers who were infected with penicillin sensitive bacteria treated themselves with limited available penicillin. Since the penicillin is excreted as unchanged form in the urine, soldiers who took the penicillin urinate for their fellow sick soldiers to drink to get the drug and avoid waste.

But when one considers some situation like finding yourself in the Sahara desert without a source of drinking water, drinking urine can save a life until water is available as the risk of infection is low although suffering from accumulation of water material is high.

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