Sipping pee to cure ailments? Why celebrity claims don't hold water

Dipa Kamdar

TV star Bear Grylls says he does it for survival — and teaches his reality show contestants to do the same. Mexican boxer Juan Manuel Márquez practised this therapy to train for his 2009 fight with Floyd Mayweather Jr (he lost). Former Indian prime minister Morarji Desai claimed a daily glass of the stuff was a remedy for many diseases and contributed to his longevity.

What is the therapy these celebrities practice? Urophagia , also known as urine therapy , is the practice of drinking urine. Whether the urine is your own, someone else’s or even obtained from an animal, people have been drinking pee as medicine for thousands of years. Most claims about urine therapy are based on anecdotes or ancient texts with no robust scientific evidence to support the benefits. However, there’s evidence to show drinking urine has a number of health risks.

In Ayurveda, urine was used to treat asthma, allergies, indigestion, wrinkles and even cancer. As a rudimentary test for diabetes, doctors used to taste urine to check how sweet it was. Now, of course, we have urine test strips to check for glucose. Historically, drinking pee to treat illnesses may have made sense because of a lack of medical alternatives. But, as urine-sipping celebrities show, the practice is still followed today.



Waste not, want not?

Urine is made by the body to get rid of waste. It is mostly made up of water (about 95%) and several waste products, including urea (2%), which is made by the liver after breaking down proteins in the body, creatinine, which is left over from energy-releasing processes in the muscles, and salts. If urine is just waste, how could drinking it be beneficial?

The kidneys act as regulators — not just to get rid of toxins but to remove anything that it doesn’t need. For example, excess vitamins that aren’t needed by the body are found in urine. Drinking urine means these vitamins and minerals are getting recycled instead of being wasted — this also goes for other hormones, proteins and antibodies that can be found in urine.

However, the amounts of these substances in a glass of urine are unlikely to be enough to be beneficial. A vitamin supplement may be more effective. Other modern uses also include cleansing and detoxification — some people have claimed continually drinking recycled urine leads to cleaner urine and blood by removing toxins and leading to better overall health. However, there’s no scientific evidence to support any of these claims.

Urine does contain urea, which is often added to skin care products as a moisturiser. But the concentration of urea in urine is unlikely to be high enough to have this effect. Urine also contains dehydroepiandrosterone, a steroid hormone produced by the body that declines with age, which has been marketed as an anti-ageing ingredient — but there isn’t enough data to demonstrate its efficacy.

Risky business

Research has found that urine contains low levels of bacteria. Drinking urine, then, can introduce bacteria and toxins into the gut and potentially cause further illness like stomach infections. Urine becomes more concentrated when it comes out again — the kidneys may have to work harder to filter out the excess, putting extra strain on them. The kidneys need water to process these salts.

Drinking urine means you have to pee out more water than you get from it, which speeds up dehydration — it’s similar to drinking seawater. Some drugs, such as penicillin, antibiotics or heart medicines, are also excreted in the urine — drinking urine can cause toxic levels of these drugs to build up in the body.

Mainstream medical communities do not endorse urine therapy as it lacks scientific evidence. Small amounts of urine drinking are unlikely to be harmful. But for tangible health benefits, other therapies with scientific evidence may be the way to go.

Dipa Kamdar is senior lecturer, Kingston University