Urine for a Treat

golden liquid that comes out of our bodies. And there it is on the ground, in a jar, in the toilet, in the urinal, on the side of a bus, wherever. We're left to contemplate this liquid and figure out what we should do with it, what can we learn from it. And indeed, every time you get to the doctor, or most times you go to the doctor, what you have to do, you have to be in a cup, that's right, because that's that liquid goal that will tell you all

sorts of things about your presence and your future. And we've been been divining with urine for thousands of years. I mean, the practice goes back, uh literally thousands of years, and we're still the thing about is we still haven't completely refined the process. We're still finding new ways to learn from urine and uh and actually uh discovered the the curative properties of urine, but not in the way that you might be thinking. We'll get into the whole

urine drinking as well. Yeah, it actually turns out to be far more complex and nuanced beyond some of the things that we already know about urina. We'll talk about that moment, Like what does it mean when my p is like electric yellow? Yeah, hold on because we'll get there, so piano jar. We'll get to to the color in just a minute. But but first let's just rehash the basics about urine. Urine, of course, is there for a reason.

It is a waste product. It's their remove extra water and water soluble waste that the kidneys filtered from the blood, so it gets rid of toxins and things that would otherwise build up in the body. Yeah. I kind of think about the kidneys as a brew house. Yeah, and uh, you know, the waste products as the hops. They're kind of like flavoring what your urine is going to look like. And it's really important because kidneys do maintain water volume

and balance as well as regulate blood composition. And if you think about it, there are really only four exit strategies for substances in your body feces, your breath, sweat, and urine. So urine is obviously one of the think four here. I remember when I wrote the article about saunas for how stuff work, I was looking into the whole, uh you know, question of what can you can you sweat out impurities, and you can sweat out some impurities, but really urine is the go to for for those

liquid impurities. So you'll get a little with sweat, but it's mainly the P. Yeah, and let's talk about that P because it is composed primarily of water. We're talking about in a well hydrated person. The other five percent, we're talking all sorts of organic solute including uria, creatine, uric acid, and tracing massive enzymes, carbohydrates, hormones, fatty acids. It goes the list goes down and down and down. Yeah, it's it's kind of I mean the thing again, it's

a waste product. So you get into that whole situation of when you want to learn about an ancient culture, what do you end up looking for as an archaeologist. You look for their garbage heat, you know, you find out what they're eating, what they're they're throwing away, what kind of little bits of detritus um give us a picture of their lives. And thus we do the same

with urine. And and we're discovering more and more ways to do that with urine because you see what they ate, what kind of uh, you know, what they took, part of, what kind of environment they lived in. So we're talking about here is a a parr more nuanced understanding or beginnings of understandings of urine, because you know, if you look at compounds right now that are tested in urine, you're you're talking about hundred and fifty, not three thousand.

So it turns out that urine beats out saliva as one of the most complex fluids in the human body. And it h that has ushered in new urine based diagnostic tests for colon and prostate cancer, celiac disease, and pneumonia. Yeah, that was fascinating. We're you know, talking different compounds can show up in there that should show you know, what kind of drug the drugs the person that happens to be taking, what they're drinking, what food's reading, what's cosmetics

they're wearing. I never thought about cosmetic signatures in urine, But there you go. And uh, I mean in the course of great thing, and this will come up again again. The great thing about urine is that, unlike other ways you might test the body, I mean, it just comes right out. It's it's you're not having to dig into the body, cut into the body. It's it's a pre and invasive way of getting at some data about how

the organism is working. And it's I mean it's as far as gross things that come out of the body, it's generally not that gross. Now, if you want to read the tea leaves as it were of your own p at home, without going through a highly diagnostic test, you can do so just by looking at the color, right. Yeah, And you know, in urine comes in a rainbow of colors. Like on one hand, you can have like the extremely

dark urine. You can have the crystal clear urine. That's what I tend to try and go for on a good day, drink enough water tour it's just straight up clear. I'm being all day long. And then you have you have various other shades in between. So, uh, the big one. If you have colorless water urine, what does that mean? Just straight up, you've been drinking a lot of water all right, which I tend to see. It's like a badge of It's like it's like an achievement award that

you get. It's like, there we go, I'm doing it. Now. Let's let's get really specific here. Have you ever peed into the boilet, looked and then saw that day glow yellow and you're just a little bit taken back? Yes? Um, so certainly when I've taken like a lot of vitamins, sometimes I'll see that really yellow, or or if I take those when I had a U T I recently I took those pills that help kidneys have flesh of kidneys and decrease of paint, and that's like bright orange.

It's one of those things you take it in an hour previously and then you forget that you took it, and then whoa, you know, it's like a it's like a muppet in there. It's alarming, it can be. And if you have tea colored urine, well that means that you're probably dehydrated. Now a lot of these more concentrated urine. Right, this tends to be the kind of urine you see in abandoned soda bottles. I notice, you know, you never see like really clear, healthy urine in an old sun

drop container. It's always like dark brown urine that you're not sure if it's if it's p R motor oil at first glance. Yeah, But if you're urinating into a bottle, you're probably there's probably some sort of thing going on there that means that your entire circumstances and you're just reaching for the the nearest vessel. Now, the thing that you want to strive for is straw colored urine. Really,

so am I overreaching with my crystal? It's possible. It's possible that you might have to dilute of urine, in which case you might want to back off a little bit because that's raw color kind of shows that there's a balance going on in terms of the salts in your body and everything else. Okay, Now, of course the big one, of course, if there's any blood, and that's generally that's generally I mean, that is a sign that

you need to get it checked out. It could be something simple, could be a U T I. But it can also be something far more serious, I mean, bladder cancer, you name it. So it comes down to again the fact that that you can tell so much about how the organs is functioning by looking at the year, and even something as simple as just visually what's going on

there now? Since and we won't put too much into this because we could probably spend an entire podcast about peace, but a sugary smell might indicate the presence of blood sugar that's been excreted into the urine and could be caused by diabetes or pregnancy. And of course, as we know, certain foods produced a sulfur containing amino acid. Looking at usparagus v. S asparagus for the first time following this podcast, be prepared possibly for something a little a little funky.

All right, let's talk about some myths of p because there are ideas of P use out there in the world, and I'm talking specifically about drinking your own P Is this a good idea? Yes? Or now? Um no, it's not a good idea? And uh what, I I know it sounds amazing. I mean a lot of it comes down to the fact that you know we're talking about it earlier. What's it made off water. Okay, that's great, we need water, but that remaining five is garbage and toxic,

toxic garbage that you're better better off not drinking. Now, it's an idea that has that keeps coming down. I guess you're something, you know, cyclical and sort of magical sounding about drinking urine. As pointed out by Ryan Bradling in Popular Science article Classic f y, I is it ever okay to drinking on urine? Points out that that that the Celts and Iberian Peninsula gargle it to whiten their keith, that in air vetic medicine you had the practice of ama roli, which is the Sanskrit word that

refers to urine therapy. And there's even the argument that the problem that Proverbs five supports the act saying drink waters from thy own cistern, flowing water from thy own self. Now, there are some readers who took issue with that proverb, so we won't spend a lot of time with that parsing that up. But yeah, this idea of drinking your own urine has been around for a long time, and you really see it in survivalist situations. So you have

someone like Aaron Rawlson. He's the rock climber who was pinned under a boulder and he drank his own urine during a five day or deal in which he ended up amputating his own arm. And you have people like Bear Grills. He's a survivalist who say, yeah, it could work. But the idea there is it might work to drink your own urine in um this dire situation only if you have that correct level of dilute water in your pea.

So if you are dehydrated to the point that you drink your pea, it's not a good idea because it becomes more and more concentrated with all of those um excess electrolytes. We're talking about chloride, sodium, and potassium. You do not want to fill up on this stuff. Yeah, I mean, it's one of the reasons why the Army Field Manual for Survival, Evasion and Recovery listed on the

do not Drink list along with seawater and blood. So really it's it's to think about that it's basically on the same level as drinking seawater blood in a survival situation. To your point, if you had you know, somebody around with really crystal clear urine. You could maybe make the case for it, but in a survival situation, it's going

to be that orange stuff in the sun drop container. Yeah, because most likely in that situation, you maybe you get that first batch and it's fine, but as you continue to not replenish your system with fresh, clean water and your kidneys don't get fleshed out, well, then again, the more concentrated toxic substances accumulate. And what we're talking about here is sodium drawing water out of yourselves, dehydrating you. And of course too much catasium can lead to heart attacks.

All Right, we'll hold on to that jar of urine because we're gonna take a quick breaking. When we come back, we're going to get into yet another popular myth about the use of urine in do it yourself medicine. Okay, if you're on the beach, friend is has just emerged from the ocean screaming. It appears that they have been

stung by jellyfish. Now, some people might decide that at that very moment that they are going to break protocol and friendship, assuming they don't have this level of intimacy, and urinate on their friend because they think that will alleviate the pain. Well, I'm pretty sure you should never urinate on your friends. First rule, first rule. So if you find yourself breaking that rule, you need to ask yourself some serious, hard questions about what's going on. Um.

But yeah, this is something we see a lot. It's this is it's just a common trope. It shows up in TV shows and uh, just sort of part of our popular consciousness, the idea that, oh, the jellyfish sting is awful, but we have the cure right in our own body. All we have to do is is muster up some urine and splash that on there, and that will relieve the symptoms. Right. And I think, oh, it's sterile. Well, sure it's sterile while it's inside of you, but when

it goes down the track, it's picking up bacteriaus. So when it exits your body, it is not errol any longer. But that's not even really the problem. Um. And to discuss the problem of why this actually may worsen the sting, we have to look at the jellyfish's skin cells, these stinging cells or nita sites. Now, these cells hold a barbed thread like tube called a neumoticist and this is filled with venom, and Matt Sonicic writing from Mental Fault,

describes it further. He says, on the outside of each cell that tiny hair called a nita cell, and when this hair trigger is to serve the cell's toxic harpoon explodes from its capsule and into the skin of the jellyfish's prey or an unlucky swimmer. Yeah. This one thing to keep in mind about the jellyfish thing is that it's not just this magical touch that you know, dark

magical touch that that burns you. It's not like being burned by something where the source of the burn is taken away and therefore all you have is the injury. You have those uh, those little nemetosis still present and they're clinging on, so they're still there. There's still some weaponry on the skin that can be activated, for instance, by scratching. If you start scratching the jellyfish sting, you're going you're gonna aggravate those nemetosis that are still clinging there,

and you're gonna get more sting. Yeah, that's right, because there are a couple of things that really spring those harpoons of venom into action. And whe is pressure so right, if you use your own fingers to squeeze at it or try to pinch it off, you're gonna get stung. And it also senses changes in its environment, like chemical composition. So what would happen if you peet on this, Well, what would happen is that those cells would say, hmmmm,

this is odd. There's more water in this composition than seawater, and we see this as an attack, and it would actually release more venom as your urine trickled over the wound. Yeah, any change to the balance of solids is going to set off more stinging. So I mean because the thing about this, The thing is, though um amusing and perplexing about the urine of situation, is that what we're saying here is that the liquid you need to use to wash off that sting and get rid of any clinging

neumatsis that are still there is saltwater. And and and since there's an extremely high probability that you were stung by that saltwater jellyfish in saltwater, then it stands the reason you need to just walk three feet and get some more saltwater and wash it off. And if for some reason you're stunt like somebody males a jellyfish to you and then you're stung. Well, then you need to get something like vinegar. But but you're just using urine.

I mean, you would like we said, you have that water five percent impurity, but then there are all these varying degrees of of uncertainty as to what its actual content is going to be. So it's possible that you could have like magic uh urine. You can have just the right level in your urine super dehydrated, just super dehydrated I guess, just the just the right salt nous to where it would be effective. But that would the chances of that being the case are are pretty rare.

And if your urine is that concentrated with salt, then you haven't entirely different problems right right, Like you put the jellyfish thing now is sort of on the sidelines, yeah, I mean, but again it comes back to the saltwater. Saltwater is what you need to watch that staying with. And there's an ocean of it there in front of you, so use it all right, So there we go. Now you know about jellyfish things, please don't pee and your friends and should we even talk about the asparagus problem.

I feel like this is such a chicken and egg problem. Yeah. And you know, back when the podcast was Step in the Science Libe, I feel like we did an episode on it about like something, because there's a lot of it's legitimately interesting research into the genetics of this. You know, the idea that some people have the gene that that lets them makes their peace smell like asparagus when they eat it, others don't. And then the reverse of that, some people have the gene that allows them to smell

the the the asparagus smell and others don't. So which way is it? Yeah? And as as far as I can tell, in all the literature that is built up on this, and there's a ton of it, by the way, the consensus seems to be it could be a little from column A M B right, a little bit that you could smell it or you can't smell it, you can produce, you can produce it, or you can't produce it. I mean, I think this is we'll put this in the area of consciousness. We don't know asparagus. We don't

know exactly why pie smells like asparagus or doesn't. And we don't know the center of consciousness. Yeah, those are the two big ones that science. Science has on the blackboard if you have to cross them off. But you know, while people are worrying over the genetics of asparagus p there's a lot of precious euro kinees's going straight down the toilet and that stuff is gold. I love. This story to me is about innovation, It's about imagination, creativity.

And one guy by the name of Earl Braxon. Now this is a portable toilets businessman who also has a pharmaceuticals firm pharmacuticles dot org. And he figured out that if you could ease out this enzyme euro kinds, and you could figure out the sort of volume that you need to to really make enough of it, well then maybe you could turn a profit in a medical world. But how how to collect all of this urine? But first,

let's talk about why euro kindness is important. I mean, basically, it's it's gold because it is used to dissolve blood clots and heart patients. So it has an an enormous potential out there as a as as a as a medicine. So even even though this idea that you can just drink your urine for health is complete bunk. Here we see someone who has who has said, yes, there is this a fabulous medicine hidden in our urine. All we

have to do is find a way to extract. And of course that becomes the problem, especially if your businesses is poor to bodies. Because we've we've all seen a portable toilet before. We know there's not there's not always a lot of technology going on there. Generally it consists of a of a dark hole into which we cast things and then we we just assume that somebody else is going to suck it out with a with a

giant tank on the back of the truck. Well, and they do right, and then they deliver it over to

Braxton's business. And that's where it becomes really important that those participants that Coachella with full bladders are are really depositing this, because it turns up that he, along with biochemists Dr. E. Kendall Pie, they created a system that could separate the enzyme from the urine and come up with a viable product that could be used in a life threatening situation where you you know, you have the blood clot and a lung and you just get this

injection and poof this enzyme actually dissolves it. It's pretty amazing stuff. And in the process of of seeing this this stuff out of the urine and to u the medical industry, that millions and millions of dollars are made. That's the bottom line. Well, yeah, that there we go. Yes, there's always profit at the bottom of the toilet there, but again there's a there's there's a pretty nickel process

involved in extracting neuro kinny. There's a certain amount of volume of urine that is required, so you're probably not gonna really benefit from starting to do it yourself with your own golden leavings. That's a really good point. By the way, just in case you guys are there are like, hey, this is something I could get into a little niche business. And by the way, I think that Braxton has cornered the market on that. I mean he's got he's got

quite a little business of porta potties. He's been doing it for a while too, so this is not something that's spread up in the last even few years. Here's a little factoid for you. For one of his porta potty lines, he tried to use um the phrase here's Johnny. Oh, I like the well I was thinking of the shining Well you're thinking of Johnny Carson. Yeah, And the Tonight Show sued him and said, you cannot use our famous

term here's Johnny for our porta potties. Wow. See, I would think it would be bad because I'm picturing Jack Nicholson hacking through the side of the portagon one and to do my business. Maybe that's the other part of it. They're like and subconsciously people think that they're gonna get hacked to death while they're popping a squat um. But I mean, this guy is the essence of just persistence.

Because even after Carson died, he tried again, well you know name and again This Night Show said well, yeah, alright, what else could we get from urine? I mean something groundbreaking? Yeah, And this is amazing because I know what some of your thinking. You're thinking, all right, well you can you can get your knees out of urine through this complex process.

But that's not really the same as saying, you know, urine has curative properties, so there's magic in the urine that can be used to to to heal um a wounded or aging or disease human body. But this really I think settles the argument. According to a two thousand thirteen paper published in the journal stem Cells, Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center's Institute for Regenitive Medicine and colleagues identified

stem cells in urine. So stem cells. Again, stem cells are important because they're the of the children of the future, right. They are cells that can become various different types of cell types. There there are blank slate so in the you can you can use and we talked about this before in the especially when we're talking about the tissue

growing and the potential to grow new organs. These are the blank slates that can be used to create tissues of varying types and then create new replacement flesh, replacement organs, you name it. I mean, it's key and cord to the future of medicine, and how to get those stem

cells has been the problem so far. So to know that this is a viable resource, we don't know exactly, you know, to what extent, but to know that this the resource is pretty huge and the team successfully directed stem cells from year and to become the ladder type cells we're talking about smooth muscle and uh, we're talking about the cells in line the bladder, but the yurine derived cells could also form bone, cartilage, fat skeletal muscle,

nerve and endough flial cells which line blood vessels. In fact, and the bone thing here, researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences at the Kwandong Provincial Key Laboratory of Stem Cell Biology and regenera IF Medicine have created a potential method for growing teeth from stem cells obtained in urine. And when I mentioned this to our video producer, Tyler Klang, do you know what he said? What did he say?

He said, Well, that would make you a real potty mouth. Ah. Now, one thing to keep in mind about this study is that what they were able to achieve here is they grew tooth like structures on mice, so soft, tooth like structure, so um. And so it's not like that the mouse had, like, you know, a big mouthful of human teeth. Think more like, you know, you threw a mouse and some teeth into into two different teleporters and combine them into one horrific thing on the other end. That this is the very

beginning of the ability to grow teeth. But but it sheds some light on the future where you can imagine a day when when we can look to urine, this thing that for ages we have just you know, washed away, we can go to that and uh and then use the stem cells in the urine to heal the body.

So we have in a a one episode called I think it was called Doctor in Your Toilet, But we talked about how important it is that you know, what comes out of our body can really help direct us in terms of curing ourselves, and how in future senses we might be able to do more of a d

I Y set up. But can you imagine, um, you know, a hundred years from now, sort of taking some of the stem cells out and being like loss of tooth, better put it in the little stem cell incubator and uh, you know maybe in a couple of hours I have a new tooth to put in there. Yeah, you would go into the dentist and the first thing you do is you just pean a cup and then they we take it from there. Um. You know, I like what

you're You're talking about the doctor and the toilet. You know, I often think of that when I I think about the human need to look at the things that come out of our bodies. You know. Uh, and you know because because again it's something is simple with seeing blood in the urine is a is a sign that something's wrong. If if there's something weird about our stool, that's another sign that something's wrong. There's something weird coming out of our nose, out of our mouth. I mean, it's just

at it's very basics. It's it's the organism evaluating itself looking to the urine for answers, and our techniques of looking at the urine have only improved, and again we're still finding things. That's That's just it blows my mind to think of that. Yeah, and I also started thinking about Freud. We said that was like one of the phases of children is creating, Yeah, creating the thing that came out of their body. And they're so excited because

they're like, I created that, I did that. Um, alright, let's not bring for it into it. Instead, let's talk about urine and courtship in the animal kingdom, because you know that's happening there. Oh yeah, I mean it's it's pretty huge. Um. You know, we've talked about especially when

we we've we've talked about parasites in the past. We often talk about mouse urine, and of course mice live in this world of senses, a world of smells, so they live in a world of pheromones, and that's where the pheromones are coming out in the form of urine. So in that sense, my mouse urine is a form

of communication, and you see that in other examples. I'm thinking about crayfish and I'm essentially thinking about this as the urine fight club because the reason is is that males male crayfish will respond to urinary signals of female crayfish, but the females will exhibit aggressive behavior at the same time. So it's thought that by stimulating aggressive behavior and males, that females are gauging the male size and their strength and trying to figure out who is going to be

the fittest male to fertilize their eggs. And this was actually information that was found by Fiona Barry and Thomas Brighthapped from the University of Whole UK. I kind of love to peek into that lab and see these crayfish fighting it out. Now. Another animal of note is of course the giraffe, and I've been reading a lot about giraffes recently, m probably more so than most people for fun um sort of. Um, so, my son has a

book on giraffes. It's only five pages long and it stuff called the Baby Giraffe, and it only has limited information about their life cycle. But I'm I'm asked to read this book over and over again, and oddly enough, it does not get into what we're about to talk about here, and that is the fact that male giraffes assess female fertility by testing the females urine to detect their reproductive status. Yeah. I thought that's just pretty interesting. They act as a kind of piece at fertility test.

Yeah yeah, I mean, I'm not suggesting that in the human species, but in some ways it might be more convenient, right, because you just assess that the quality of the p and say, ah, yes, okay, you're an asteris. But the thing is is that the female draffe is in heat and asters only one day out of every two weeks. So it would makes sense that they would have such a refined system to pinpoint when that is, and they don't have a lot of time to waste. I mean,

the giraffes are prey animals. They have to be on the run. And I remember correctly, they're only sleeping thirty minutes a day in in small chunks. So it's it's a it's a life on the run. It's a life of always keeping your head up and noticing what's going on. So you don't have a lot of time for extra fooling around. You need to get right down to business. You need and know that this is going to benefit

your jeans. And if you're curious about how this urine tasting is going down, just to let you know, the female can choose who to give her data to by choosing to urinate or not when the male lowers his head to her rump. So it's not just that the males are going up to females all day long and having a taste. But you know, there's certain times that the female says, okay, fine, it's a little more refined

than that. So in a sense, there's a little more romance. Sure, yeah, sure, and you know, so you know there's a little bit more selectivity going on. She's not just giving her data out willy nilly, Okay. Well, I think that's fascinating. I think that the book on the baby Drafte could have been six pages long, and we could have we could have gotten that info in there. I think that you're going to write that book on the drafte, but I'm sensing, yeah,

six pages of scientific wonder. So there you have it, a little insight into the salty leavings that we all face every day, and hopefully we'll all leave here with a little better understanding about the possibilities contained there in. Yeah, it's kind of a poop poop clatter of your information for you. You knew, didn't you. All right? Uh, if you guys want to check us out a bit more, you can do so. Yeah, I just head on over to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That's their website.

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