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kazinja -> RE: Another pee question (4/24/2007 3:42:40 PM)
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There are a lot of misconceptions about the drinking of urine and urine therapy.
Urine from healthy subjects is virtually sterile. In war situations it has been used extensively to disinfect wounds.
The composition of urine is much like blood plasma, not what you would call waste. It contains metabolites and those substances that the body needs to excrete to maintain homeostasis, the situation of dynamic physiological balance. So these 'wastes' may well be nutritive substances like vitamins and minerals that have been ingested above the body’s needs.
The therapeutic claims of drinking urine might be explained by the minute quantities of immunological agents (like antigens, chemokines or tumor markers) that provide extra information to the immune system when passing through the digestive tract. Most of the body’s immunological activity is concentrated in the gut.
Urine will contain small amounts of hormone metabolites. These metabolites, in the case of estrogens, may be less or more biologically active than the estrogens themselves. Hormones assessed from urine include cortisol, 17-hydroxycorticoids, aldosterone, dehydroepiandrosterone (dhea), testosterone, 17-ketosteroids, progesterone metabolites, estrogens, estrogen metabolites and growth hormone. In how far these metabolites have an effect when taken orally in the amounts considered here, I could not say without further study, but when adverse effects appear, they will disappear soon after discontinuing drinking other people’s urine, I would think.
I think that drinking the urine of someone who is on any drug is not advisable, unless one knows the metabolites of that drug to be harmless. This goes for recreational as well as therapeutic drugs. Some psychoactive mushroom substances seem to improve during their trip through the body!
Your body will dehydrate sooner by not drinking at all than by drinking urine (only). In Ayurveda and Traditional Chinese Medicine drinking considerable amounts of urine has been done by millions of people for thousands of years with positive health results. It is advisable –like Bobby said- that the person providing the urine drink plenty, so the (os)molarity of the urine does not get too high. The person drinking the urine should drink plenty of water as well.
Health effects range from improvement of skin conditions and fungal infections of the nails to promoting longevity. I’ve got a number of books on urine therapy that claim a host of uses for all sorts of ailments, providing only anecdotal evidence mostly, but still rather convincing. One book in English I can remember the name of: 'Your own perfect medicine'.
People often claim the urea and ammonia content of urine poses a health threat. Some research and a few calculations seem to refute this.
Doses of 12 to 15 grams per day (sometimes 30 grams) were given to cancer patients with no more side effects than ‘occasional minor gastric irritation’, as described in the (now somewhat obsolete alternative medicine) book ‘Alternative Cancer Therapies' by Ross Pelton.
If you consume a day’s worth of urine, you ingest about 0.6 grams of urea, so watersports of this nature will not give you gout, I guess (sources used for this calculation: European Journal of Clinical Nutrition (2004) 58, 270-276).
“Eighty patients with portal hypertension due to various hepatic diseases were subjected to the oral ammonia tolerance test (OATT). Blood samples were collected before and at 30-min intervals after the administration of ammonium chloride (50 mg/kg)”. (Tohoku J Exp Med. 1981 Sep;135(1):93-101.)
That’s a single dose of 3.5 grams for people with portal hypertention due to hepatic disease!
In another protocol for the oral ammonia tolerance test, 10 grams of ammonium citrate is given orally in a single dose.
This is considerably more than the 2.4 grams you ingest from a whole day’s worth of urine (calculated from the same source as uric acid).
When talking about the ‘toxicity’ of ammonia, the form and concentrations considered are those used in industrial and household chemicals: pure ammonia dissolved in water. Urine is a different story. The ammonia in the urine is in the salt form. Check for more infromation the IPCS-Inchem safety reports on Ammonia HSG37 and EHC54 (www.inchem.org). The reference value for ammonium is around 90 micrograms/dL (0.09%). Household ammonia has a concentration of about 5%, concentrated ammonia 25-35%.
Hope this may help
Enjoy
Kazinja's Ronald
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