The TV adventure Bear Girls has gained worldwide fame for its often unorthodox and sometimes extreme survival quests for staying hydrated.
He has squeezed moisture out of elephant dung, digested the contents of a camel’s intestines, drained yak eyeball juice and, perhaps most famously, drank his own urine.
If you’ve got seen geese slide their pee down their mouths on camera, you may conclude that it is a legitimate survival hack. Anyway, Grylls Used to be in SAS.
In one event, He tells the audience Peeing on the bottom is a waste of fluids, drinking your individual urine is “safe,” and hot, salty mouth-to-mouth is suffocating.
Let’s see if that is fact or fiction.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4u_xmfswysw
Your urine is sort of a box
Liquids make up about 60% Your total body weight. To maintain the proper balance of gear on this internal environment, your kidneys will continually filter 180 litres of blood fluid (plasma) every day.
Thankfully, we do not project 180l of urine, because our kidneys “throw back” or work again. about 99% Do they filter back into the bloodstream?
The best approach to visualize this process is to picture a messy garage. If you tried to sort out the chaos and take away only the unwanted items, you would be there all day. A more efficient method is to empty all the things within the driveway, keep what’s necessary, and toss the remainder. Your kidneys use the identical strategy.
They ignore large cells and proteins, and filter out the plasma portion of the blood, which essentially empties all the garage. They then return the nutrients back into the bloodstream. What is left behind becomes the urine, the physical body.
Its final contents depend upon quite a lot of aspects, including your hydration status, metabolic activity and current weight-reduction plan (including medications and supplements).
Normally, urine is about 95% water. Remaining:
- Urea (about 2%, a byproduct of protein breakdown, which we’ll come back to shortly)
- Creatinine (about 0.1%, a byproduct of muscle metabolism)
- Salt and protein.
So does urine hydrate you? Is it protected?
Answer… yes and no. The answer is not all the time clear because, as we saw above, what’s in your urine relies on what was within the garage.
If you are well-hydrated and healthy, your urine will look clear and straw-colored, meaning it’s mostly water (but will still contain urea, salt, and other waste products). A drink of this “first pass” urine will really provide you with some measure of hydration.
But in a gristle-type survival setting, you will be losing water out of your body through other means. For example, you’ll lose about 450ml a day through your breath through water vapor and about 300ml a day. If you were in a hot, humid environment, these skins would increase significantly.
As a result, your kidneys might want to work harder to carry on to precious water and keep it in your blood. This will further concentrate the waste products, and what results in the bin will probably be quite toxic to your body.
So by drinking urine in a survival setting, you will be consuming a considerable amount of waste products, including urea, which your body obviously has to eliminate.
By drinking urine with a high concentration of waste products (and/or if you might have impaired kidneys), urea and other metabolic waste products can accumulate in your body. It will be toxic to cells, especially within the nervous system.
It could cause symptoms similar to vomiting, muscle pain, itching and changes in consciousness. Without treatment, this toxic condition (called uremia) will be life-threatening.
Is your urine sterile?
Toxins aren’t the one problem.
Although the urine leaving the kidneys is probably going sterile, the remainder of the urinary tract (bladder and urethra) just isn’t. Our bodies are stuffed with resident bacteria that maintain our health and support each day functions – once they live of their normal habitat.
So when urine passes through the bladder and urethra, it might collect these bacteria. If you drink that urine, you are reintroducing these bacteria to parts of the body where they do not belong—mainly the gastrointestinal tract.
In healthy conditions, stomach acid often kills lots of these bacteria. But in survival situations where dehydration, heat stress or poor nutrition can compromise the gut lining, the chance of those bacteria crossing into the bloodstream increases. This can set the stage for a life-threatening infection.
This is the last item you must wander away within the bush.
In short
Please don’t depend on drinking your individual urine should you’re lost within the bush. It’s mainly the equivalent of drinking from a bun.