Not everything can ‘pee’ true
There are many urban legends about many things we take for granted. We think they are true but they are actually misconceptions, including some about pee.
1. You can drink piss
Survival experts often advise against it, even under extreme conditions, because it contains about 2% salt, which can exacerbate the effects of dehydration. Urine therapy, which involves drinking urine or rubbing it into the skin or gums, isn’t currently recognized as beneficial by any medical body. On the contrary, diarrhea is a common adverse effect of drinking pee, which is owing to it being less sterile than it is often supposed to be.
Urine is essentially a waste product, consisting of a mixture of water and substances that your body has already worked hard to eliminate.
“It is a common belief that urine is sterile, which it normally is if you don’t have a problem with your renal tract”, Dr. Zubair Ahmed explained.
“However, once it leaves the body, it can be contaminated with certain bacteria, and ingesting this bacteria can make you feel unwell and lead to serious complications”.
“Urination is one way our body gets rid of toxic by-products”, he explains. “There is no evidence at all that ingesting these substances has any health benefits. While drinking a small amount of urine is unlikely to be hazardous to your health, there is not enough modern evidence of its efficacy to suggest drinking it is healthy”.
“The whole point of urinating is for the kidneys to filter the blood and it gets rid of any excess fluid and salts, as well as minerals”, he said. “Urine in a healthy person is made up of about 95% water, but the other 5% is waste products the body is looking to expel, such as potassium and nitrogen, which, if you have too much in your body, can cause problems”.
“When you drink urine, it will eventually come back out again and be much more concentrated, which could lead to gut problems”, he says. “The kidneys will have to work hard to filter out all the excess again, putting strain on them”.
“Some people think drinking urine gives you a quick vitamin shot but there are much healthier ways of making sure you get your vitamins, such as eating a healthy and balanced diet or taking supplements”.
Also, nutritionists expressed against the practice of pee-drinking, known as urophagy.
It’s a misconception that pee that contains 95% water is safe to drink; adding the remaining 5% makes a big difference.
“Some of the waste products excreted via urine, such as nitrogen, sodium, and other minerals, may cause issues such as dehydration if they are consumed excessively”, says Keri Filtness, a nutritionist.
2. Piss reveals all about your drug habits
A urine test can only disclose specific substances for a short amount of time, according to the FDA: In 3 days, heroin, cocaine, and meth will be out of your system; MDMA in 4 days; and cannabis will be gone in a week.
Urine, on the other hand, can get you high: The hallucinogenic fly agaric fungus was immensely popular with Siberian Koryaks, although it was difficult to come by. When a shaman got their hands on it, they’d find that their piss was in high demand, as the mushroom’s most pleasurable characteristics were still intact.
3. You can piss on a jellyfish sting
To explain this, it is essential to understand the origin of the pee sterility theory that we mentioned before. According to Science News, the legend of piss sterility arose in the 1950s, when epidemiologist Edward Kass was attempting to find a way to screen patients for urinary tract infections before to surgery. Kass created the midstream urine test and established a numerical cutoff for the number of bacteria in normal urine: less than 100,000 colony-forming units per milliliter of urine. If the quantity of bacteria that develop in a lab dish containing the pee falls below this threshold, a person tests ‘negative’ for germs in their urine.
Since the level of bacteria did not surpass Kass’s criterion, it was considered that urine was sterile, according to Evann Hilt of the Loyola University of Chicago. Unfortunately, this is not the case. The hilt and her colleagues, according to the same report, employed a more contemporary technology to detect tiny quantities of germs in normal urine. They placed urine samples in lab plates and allowed the germs to grow in more hospitable circumstances and more than 70% of urine samples included bacteria, with at least 33 different species of bacteria (at the genus level) in normal urine.
Even so, according to Bob Cooper, one of Australia’s finest survival specialists, the fact that pee isn’t completely sterile doesn’t rule out using it to treat cuts and wounds as a last resort. Simply avoid exposing the piss-soaked wound to the sun because urine may become septic quite quickly when it comes out of the body, he told ABC.
So, if you’ve been stung by a jellyfish, pissing on it isn’t a good idea. On the jellyfish’s skin, cells called cnidocytes contain organelles called nematocysts, which contain venom. When you get stung, some of these are likely to attach to you, and bringing in fresh water will likely exacerbate them, causing more venom to be released. Therefore, pee is significantly less likely to be useful than rinsing with salt water.
4. You should go to the bathroom if you need to piss when you wake up
Micturition syncope is a condition that causes you to pass out when you take a big piss. It’s a little mysterious, but it’s considered to be caused by blood pressure dropping suddenly after a big wet release. It can be a recurring problem or a one-time occurrence.
It is recommended that those who suffer from this disease avoid alcohol, pee before bed, and take their time getting up to urinate. Additionally, pissing when seated reduces the risk of falling and harming oneself.
5. Always lift the seat before pissing
Certainly, pissing on the seat and then leaving it there is not a pleasant experience, especially for those who come after.
However, even if the seat is raised, urine is still flying everywhere. Even a well-aimed stream can cause splashback, with as much as 7,550 drips of urine falling into the rear of the bowl from a huge piss. Tadd Truscott, a professor of Mechanical Engineering at Brigham Young University, stated that “a male of normal height urinating into a typical toilet while standing will launch small droplets out of the toilet and onto the floor, cupboards, and shower curtain”.
Anyway, there’s another risk, which is the possibility that the seat will collapse and crush your penis. In the United States, there were 13,175 ER visits related to collapsing toilet seats between 2002 and 2012, with 68% of them being “crush injuries”. Although the vast majority of these were young boys who suffered little bodily harm, only five of them were adult penises.
Many problems may be solved by installing splashback-free urinals in residential bathrooms, but the most practical answer is to simply sit down on the toilet. According to a 2014 study, it may be helpful for men with prostate problems because the preferred abdominal posture makes it easier for certain guys to squeeze out every last drop of pee. In Japan, Taiwan, and Sweden, there have even been health campaigns encouraging men to sit while pissing.
Source melmagazine.com
