Is it true that the darker the color of your pee, the more dehydrated you are? Or it a function of the food that you ate 8 hours ago?
It could be either. Lighter pee generally indicates more water, but some things, like vitamin B supplements can turn urine yellow or orange.
I was going to say almost exactly the same thing as cher3, so I’ll shut up and move on.
Try boiling your pee until the water component evaporates to see what color the resulting residue is.
Is this just a great way to ruin a piece of cookware and make the house stink, or is there a purpose to this?
Usually your urine will be dark and cloudy if your body cannot afford to lose much water and light and clear if your body has plenty of water. I once became very badly dehydrated during a long illness and one of the doctors who treated me told me this. Diet can affect the color of your urine, but I don’t know that it can affect the clarity.
There are some medical conditions (usually kidney problems IIRC) that can reduce your body’s ability to seperate water from waste. Someone suffering from such a condition could drink plenty of water and have light, clear urine but still be badly dehydrated. This is because the water would just be going in one end and coming out the other without being absorbed by the body.
A friend of mine is a marine, she told me a while back, that’s one of the first things they train you about being out in the middle of nowhere. You can tell how (de)hydrated you are by the shade of urine.
Apparently they were given color strips to compare against… so I think there’s valididty here.
Well, back in the day when I was on the JV soccer team, our coach told us we knew we were properly hydrated if our piss was mostly clear, and we had to get up once in the middle of the night to take a leak. This was for playing soccer, of course, not for being the lazy, fat troglodyte that I am right now.
He also mentioned that some vitamin suppliments can darken your pee even if you are well hydrated.
yep…the darker it is, the more concentrated your pee is. If you’re starting to get dehydrated, your body will retain more water through greater rate of reabsorption in the kidneys!
Also, minerals dissolved in water can change the color of your pee.
A trip to Nevada where the water is high in iron and sulphur among other things changed my pee to a charming mahogany color.
True by and large. Dark urine can result from drugs, jaundice, dyes, alcaptonuria, blood from the kidneys/bladderr/urethra or running marathons, that sort of thing.
Kinda gives new meaning to “earning your stripes”, doesn’t it? 