"Man, Woman, Wild"

Let the debate continue without personal attacks? The subject matter is so much more intriguing and pleasant to read without the ad hominum fallacies.
 
Regarding food and survival...

On my last cold weather training week, I went the first 2 days on 1 can of SPAM... the next 3 days I had NOTHING except balsam fir buds and some alder catkins. Day 1&2 without food was HELL. Day 3 was really tough. I had little energy but the hunger pangs were gone. I never did get my porcupine and at the end of day 4, I was given some jerky and a hunk of trail bread. The temperature varied from -15C to -35C. If I didn't have a can to boil water and make tea, it would have been really tough.... but doable.

I think the human body is very resiliant... however, the WILL to survive is delicate. minutes, hours, days, weeks.... shelter, fire, water, food?.... its all relative to the situation and the individual.

"Don't worry bout nothin', cause nothin's gonna be okay.":thumbup::D



Rick
 
Brother, spam is hell. :)

Although I think you can run a diesel of that waxy, fatty stuff that seems to fill the gaps between the "meat" and the can.
 
That's the best part, Nemo!!!

I boil it and drink the broth.... then roast the... ahem, meat like substance.

I haven't seen the MWW Alaska episode. I'll try and find it on the interwebz.



Rick
 
What about the drinking of the pee in the Mexico episode ?
It did not seem needful to me.
Your own pee is sterile for yourself, that i know.
But can it make sense to hydrate on the piss of someone else ?
 
Rick Marchand said:
I boil it and drink the broth.... then roast the... ahem, meat like substance.
Click to expand...
I saw a "bacon" version of Spam at the Wallymartinez. My daughter was dry heaving at the thought.

Anything works when your hungry, but right now I'm fat and happy. No spam for me, thanks.

I had a friend who loved to fry it up and eat it with eggs.

But yeah, Marchand, freezing sucks. Starving sucks. Starving and freezing sucks. Starving and freezing a long time sucks even more. No doubt about it.
 
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Gambrinus said:
What about the drinking of the pee in the Mexico episode ?
It did not seem needful to me.
Your own pee is sterile for yourself, that i know.
But can it make sense to hydrate on the piss of someone else ?
Click to expand...

Well, for a married couple, I'm sure they've had lots of opportunity to share all their diseases with one another. I did disagree with the urine drinking in this case and was pretty vocal about critiquing Bear on piss drinking in the past. I thought it might be fun to re-evaluate this one from a human physiology perspective and do another set of model calculations. The results sort of surprised me and is making me reconsider my earlier stance on the subject.

The kidneys are the organs responsible for maintaining osmoregulation (or in other words the appropriate salt concentration in blood). Bblood has a normal salt concentration of 280 mOsM. Blood salt concentrations and blood pH have to be kept in a very narrow range in order for you to survive. Changes in the blood salt concentration outside of the normal physiological levels cause problems such as interfering with neuron signalling which can lead to heart failure. When you over hydrate, your kidneys secrete dilute urine (as low as 50 mOsM or 5 times more diluted then your blood). When you dehydrate, your kidneys secrete concentrated urine up to a maximum concentration of 1200 mOsM or about 4 fold more concentrated than your blood. This is the body`s attempt to maintain the same salt content of the blood while working with an overall lower volume of blood in the body.

During dehydration, you are loosing much of your water to evaporation and sweat. The normal evaporation rate from lungs and across skin is about 1 L per day but this can crank up as high as 1 L per hour in high, dry heat present in the desert. Stop sweating and you overheat. Enzymes which do the chemical work of your body don`t function if the body temperature is raised beyond 108 degree F (lethal body temperature). Sweat out too much water and your blood volume becomes so low that you loose blood pressure and the brain gets oxygen starved from a lack of ability of your heart to pump adequate amounts of blood through your arteries. Life is tough, thank god your body is a wonderful machine. But like any machine it has its limits also.

M. Hawke`s rational in the show was that they did not pee yet that day. If they were well hydrated in the early part of the day when most of the urine was being processed by the kidney, then their urine should be either diluted (if they were hyper-hydrated) relative to blood or about the same concentration of blood. After the concentration of waste fluid is adjusted in the kidney, the urine is passed into the bladder. Once the urine is in the bladder it is effectively isolated from the rest of the body. The body has no capacity to resorb salts or water from the bladder unless you drink the urine after urinating. So Mike`s thinking is that if the urine held in his bladder was dilute or around isomolar with blood he could drink it and effectively add that water back to his body. If the urine is isomolar with blood, the volume of urine consumed becomes equal to the effective amount of blood added to the body. Alternatively, if the urine consumed is more concentrated then blood, then the kidneys have to excrete the extra salt. In order to excrete that extra salt, the kidneys also have to shunt some body water to the bladder, causing a reduction in the net intake of fluid into your blood relative to what was consumed.

Calculation time. Lets say Mike produced 300 mL of urine at a concentration of 1000 mOsM (rather concentrated). This constitutes 0.3 L * 1000 mOsM = 300 mOsmoles of salt being added to the body and 300 mL of water. On the one hand its good that he added 300 mL of water to his body. However, he also added excess salt. Considering the osmolarity of blood, the equivalent volume of blood would have 0.3 L * 280 mOsM = 84 mOsmoles of salt. Therefore, he added 216 mOsmoles (300 mosmoles -84 mOsmoles) extra salt to his blood that his kidneys need to excrete. If his kidneys were to crank up the osmolarity of the new urine created to the max possible after drinking the pee, it would require a minimum of 180 mL of body water be lost to his bladder. (That is 216 mOsMoles divided by 1200 mOsM x 1000). Thus, his net intake of blood fluids was 120 mL instead of the 300 mL of liquid actually consumed. If the urine consumed was at 1200 mOsM x 300 mL, the body would need to excrete 230 mL of water back to urine and the net influx of water to his body in this case is only 70 mL. So, I have to essentially reverse my earlier stance.

Drinking your urine will give you a net gain of body fluids although it might be small compared to your total body needs. I did take a quick look at urea toxicity, the chief waste product lost to blood, and it seems doubtful this will be a problem (in the short term) although over several weeks to months can result in chronic kidney failure, blood acidosis and other problems. However, I think this is not a survival concern given the show scenario and 1 week time frame. It would be a concern if you got into a habit of drinking concentrated urine (German pornstars - beware!).

A contrasting and illustrative example would be to run the above calculations with sea water instead of urine. Sea water has an osmolarity of 2000 -2400 mOsM which surpasses the maxim concentrating ability of the kidney to produce urine. So, if you drank 300 mL of seawater at the max range of its osmolarity (2400 mOsM), then your kidney would have to excrete the excess salt using 530 mL of water. So in the case you are actually losing body water by drinking sea water. This is a sure way to screw yourself up very quickly.

Mind you, you do have to place the urine drinking strategy in the context of the body`s requirement to replace water, particularly the water being lost to your breath and sweat. Considering a daily loss of 900 mL per day under limited perspiration to as much as 1400 mL per hour under intense dry desert heat. Total daily urine production will be between 0.3 - 1.5 L day depending on how hydrated you are, with the lower mark being what Mike and Ruth were faced. So, in other words they are losing well over 1-2L (or much more!) per day due to sweat and perspiration. They can only recover between 70-180 mL of effective body fluid by consuming all the pee they produce. Short of licking the sweat off of Ruth`s body (which I`m sure many would volunteer to do), you are still in a major deficit when it comes to the rate of blood volume and blood pressure loss relative to your ability to resupply body water by recycling your urine. The loss to perspiration is simply way too high!

In the end, you absolutely have to find a new water source. Drinking your own pee might give you an extra hour of life (saying a loss of 2L per day divided by 24 h = 166 mL lost per hour) or much less if your perspiration rate is higher than 2 L per day. Put into context then, yep, you can drink your pee, but its not going to save your butt for that much longer than not having drunk your pee.
 
Gambrinus said:
What about the drinking of the pee in the Mexico episode ?
Click to expand...
Somebody at Discovery has a pee fetish. And they don't know much about the ill effects of drinking a hypertonic solution when you are dehydrated.

I've heard people say that diluted urine could be quite close to the composition of gatorade. The problem is that by the time you get into distress enough to think about drinking piss, it's because you have no water (no way to dilute it) and you're pretty dehydrated (urine is very concentrated), so it is no longer anything like gatorade. And urine always has some potentially harmful substances that no sport drink would have.

Your own pee is sterile for yourself, that i know.
Click to expand...
Ehhhhh.... it's sterile as long as it's sterile. Of course, some people have bladder infections, sometimes chronic infections, women more than men (as to both). So then it's not sterile. And of course, it's only sterile so long as you use proper aseptic technique (clean catch). Otherwise, after it's dripped through some fomunda, it's no longer sterile.

I don't drink piss or sea water.
 
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kgd said:
Put into context then, yep, you can drink your pee, but its not going to save your butt for that much longer than not having drunk your pee.
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I don't know what the rest means but I'm sure he's right.

I started typing mine before he finished posting his.
 
nemoaz said:
I saw a "bacon" version of Spam at the Wallymartinez. My daughter was dry heaving at the thought.

Anything works when your hungry, but right now I'm fat and happy. No spam for me, thanks.

I had a friend who loved to fry it up and eat it with eggs.

But yeah, Marchand, freezing sucks. Starving sucks. Starving and freezing sucks. Starving and freezing a long time sucks even more. No doubt about it.
Click to expand...
Bacon SPAM rules.

Hickory smoked SPAM is good, too.
 
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