Man drinks urine and survives

I thought that drinking urine is not wise because it's so salty that it actually "uses" more water than it gives.. (sorry for bad english)
Correct me if i'm wrong..
 
There is a similar arguement for not eating snow because the heat it takes to melt it and bring it to body temperature uses more water and/or it can reduce your core temperature to below critical levels. The the urine warning, it is almost everywhere but rarely is it actually evaluated it is more of a law by attrition. I have read similar stories about people surviving by drinking their own blood, for each of those cases you wonder if that was instrumental or not.

-Cliff
 
I checked a couple of survival books I have and they advise against this practice as it causes dehydration or only makes you more dehydrated.
 
Howdy,
This is really nothing new. Mexicans crossing the border have been known to survive the Arizona desert by drinking there own urine when the water runs out. A great book on the crossings is The Devils Highway. There are some folks out there who drink there own urine as a kind of purification for the body. I've never done it. Mabe the guy in the article couldn't move that well because of the broken hip. So getting to snow wasn't an option. I guess you do what you got to do when its all on the line.
 
I bet they would have survived anyway. I think this practice didn't have a positive effect in their hydration. The two books I consulted were both U.S. and British military survival books. I definitely have to question this idea based on what I have read.
 
Aaron Ralston drank his urine from a nalgene bottle. He states in his book that he let the urine seperate(?) and tried to drink the top layer of liquid that was the clearest.
 
I think it's a zero net gain. The waste products will build up in your body, causing your kidneys to excrete more urine. If you're not eating or sweating much, I don't think it will hurt you quickly, but it won't help either. If you're sweating like a hog, then I suspect it will contribute toward raising the crud level rapidly, and that will hurt you.

I've never been much of a believer in the "don't eat snow" tales. I wouldn't eat it at -40, when it will frostbite your mouth, but particularly warm melting snow is fine IMX. Yeah, it cools you down. When you've built up a sweat from trudging through the stuff, cooling may be what you want. If it's your only source of water, I'd try to melt it first, but to get some immediate hydration into your parched system, have a snowball. Just remember Snoopy's warning, which ties into the original post.
 
Everything I've ever read on hydration mentions that urine is a detriment. I don't think that it actually helped in this case, but it is something that desperate people do.

Eating snow wasn't what I was driving at. I could be totally wrong here but from the article he slid down a snow covered slope and dislocated his hip. He could have been seperated from his pack. He was camping, maybe he had a stove, a cup, something with which to melt snow and couldn't get to it.

It seems to me that he could have benefitted from some basic wilderness survival training and experience. Even a plastic bag filled with small amounts of snow and placed inside an outer layer of clothing in the heat of the day would have netted him something to drink. Using your own exhaled breath will melt snow in those conditions without causing further heat loss. The article does mention that he had a sleeping bag.

It just seems to me that this guy suffered when he had resources around him. Maybe he tried these things and it just doesn't mention it. Mac
 
knifeman65 said:
I bet they would have survived anyway. I think this practice didn't have a positive effect in their hydration. The two books I consulted were both U.S. and British military survival books. I definitely have to question this idea based on what I have read.
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Read The Devils Highway. A lot of them didn't survive. I'm not advocating drinking urine, just pointing out that its been done. I'm sure they could have used water bottles and distilled urine to make it potable. I've seen that done. Me, I can't say whether it's right or wrong because I've never been there. I will say this, at least the Briton survived.
 
knifeman65 said:
I checked a couple of survival books I have and they advise against this practice as it causes dehydration or only makes you more dehydrated.
Click to expand...

I have also read this in many different books etc.
Just a thought, but maybe it's one of those things that gets mentioned as not being ideal, and then the next guy says you shouldn't do it, the next relays the message as a definite no-no, and so on. Eventually, it becomes widely "known" to be the worst possible solution?

This is based on nothing short of a guess, but maybe drinking urine(:barf: ) is much less effective than water, and only has a minimum net result, but minimum is better than nothing?

It seems that sometimes practices that are supposed to fatal errors, turn out to work just fine in the real world, or at least don't have the negative result one was expecting.

I don't know, just a thought....
Jim
 
pict said:
Using your own exhaled breath will melt snow in those conditions without causing further heat loss.
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Your body is a horrible heat engine anyway, it throws off large volumes of waste heat. I find the eating snow arguement to be problematic unless you are suffering from a core temperature problem in which case dehydration is the least of your worries anyway.

If anyone actually has a metabolic arguement that for your body to produce the heat necessary to melt ice and warm it to body temp requires more water I would like to see it. Consider just moving around and disturbing still air, these will induce a radical heat loss, however how many people would link this to rapid dehydration.

I find it odd that given those two taboo items you would go with urine over snow/ice. Especially for an extended period as the urine would keep getting more concentrated each time you recycled it. At the very least why not put snow in the bottle and use the heat of the urine to melt it. Whatever he used to catch the urine could have been used to get snow ice.

-Cliff
 
Jim Craig said:
I have also read this in many different books etc.
Just a thought, but maybe it's one of those things that gets mentioned as not being ideal, and then the next guy says you shouldn't do it, the next relays the message as a definite no-no, and so on. Eventually, it becomes widely "known" to be the worst possible solution?

This is based on nothing short of a guess, but maybe drinking urine(:barf: ) is much less effective than water, and only has a minimum net result, but minimum is better than nothing?

It seems that sometimes practices that are supposed to fatal errors, turn out to work just fine in the real world, or at least don't have the negative result one was expecting.

I don't know, just a thought....
Jim
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Yes, I see what you are saying and that is certainly possible. I am no expert and was going on what I read. Hopefully none of us here will ever find ourselves in such a desperate situation that drinking your urine to "try" to survive is actually considered.
 
Cliff Stamp said:
Your body is a horrible heat engine anyway, it throws off large volumes of waste heat. I find the eating snow arguement to be problematic unless you are suffering from a core temperature problem in which case dehydration is the least of your worries anyway.

If anyone actually has a metabolic arguement that for your body to produce the heat necessary to melt ice and warm it to body temp requires more water I would like to see it. Consider just moving around and disturbing still air, these will induce a radical heat loss, however how many people would link this to rapid dehydration.

I find it odd that given those two taboo items you would go with urine over snow/ice. Especially for an extended period as the urine would keep getting more concentrated each time you recycled it. At the very least why not put snow in the bottle and use the heat of the urine to melt it. Whatever he used to catch the urine could have been used to get snow ice.

-Cliff
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I'm with Cliff on this one. Certainly, snow seems to do a fine job hydrating animals in the wild. It may (or not) temporarily lower core temp, but if you are already warm enough, then just make sure you avoid the yellow stuff.
Unless you are trying both options at the same time :D
 
I imagine that the content of urine varies highly with the level of hydration in the body to start with. If you are fully hydrated and the body is trying to rid itself of an excess of water then possibly there would be a net gain from that urine. If the body is already severely dehydrated then the waste in the urine would be highly concentrated.

If you are fully hydrated and peeing free and clear then it is also highly unlikely that you would be desperate enough to drink urine in an effort to stay alive. I'm going to stick with my current belief that distillation is the only way to make use of the stuff.

Make the most of what's in your body. Restrict activity in the heat. Don't eat. Take advantage of any external source of moisture. Mac
 
No links but IIRC,Russian scientists researched this relating to there space program.:confused: :D
 
There's a very sound reason for NOT eating snow, and it has nothing to do with it "taking more water to melt it in your body" or whatever. It's a simple matter of calories. If you have sufficient food t eat (providing calories to stoke the boiler, so to speak) then eatinc snow for hydration would have no ill effects. But snow *does* take away from core body heat and if you're already weakend from hunger, you're going to die of hypothermia. A famous case come sfrom my neck of the woods (Oregon) a man, his wife and young son (under 12 months) went for a day trip int the mountians, ill-prepared. They got lost, had a tire blowout, had no spare and were on a little-travelled road. So they decided to hike out. The mother, who was still nursing, ate snow to continue milk production. She had no food, poor clothing and was already weakend from the hike. Eating snow was enough to fatally drop her core temprature, and she died. Her husband and child were found alive.
 
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