This question occurred to me a few minutes ago, after I made my fourth trip to the restroom following drinking one 12-oz. can of Cheerwine.
Obviously, there’s a correlation between the quantity of liquid you drink, and the number of restroom visits you’ll need to get it out of your system. But do some specific drinks make you go more often? If so, why?
Beverages containing caffeine such as coffee and tea have a diuretic effect. If you drink lots of coffee, you need to go to the bathroom faster and more often than if you drink water. Don’t know what the deal is with Cheerwine, though.
Likewise with alcohol.
But was your experiment controlled? What did you have in the 6 hours preceding your can of Cheerwine? Have you repeated this trial and gotten the same results? Everything you eat and drink affects the rate of output. Four trips from only 12 ounces of *anything *sounds unusual.
Let’s see… prior to that I had a four-hour work shift in which I don’t recall eating or drinking anything, and then I spent 10, 15 minutes in the grocery store picking out the sodas. Say, a 15-minute commute home, and shortly thereafter I cracked open the soda can, consuming it relatively quickly.
I think my most recent intake of food prior to the soda was barbeque chicken, a baked potato, and two tall glasses of chocolate milk, six hours earlier. And I had a restroom break during work.
Maybe I ought to keep a food diary or something?
IANAD, but maybe you suffer from TB (Tiny Bladder). 
I sometimes worry that I might have HB (huge bladder). I sometimes drink four pints of beer, go home, tidy up the house, then take a veeeery long piss.
Yes, what you drink certainly has an effect on urine output.
If you drink saline, for instance (though why you’d do that is anybody’s guess,) you’ll produce a slow, steady output of urine, because it’s isotonic.
But if you drink plain water, it will cause a rapid change in the osmotic blood pressure when it’s absorbed, signaling the kidneys to dump a bunch of water from the bloodstream STAT, so it produces a large amount of urine quickly.
Now, despite the folklore you’ve heard about “sodas actually dehydrate you because of the salt/sodium/caffeine” that’s actually not true. Yes, it’s closer to blood’s tonicity than plain water, but it’s still well below what normal saline is (normal saline is 0.9% sodium chloride (salt.)) And the diuretic effect of caffeine isn’t that great. Trust me, if you’re stranded in the desert and haven’t had any water, and come across a 6-pack of Coke, you DEFINITELY should drink it. Though not all at once…sip the can slowly to avoid the above situation of dumping too much isotonic solution into the blood at once, because then you’ll pee out most of that water you took in.
I read somewhere once that the diuretic effect of caffeine was severely overestimates. It really did not matter.
What I have noted myself is that diet soda (aspertame) seems to go through me quickly in a way that water or coffee do not.
Same here. I drink coffee all the live long day at work and I go maybe twice or three times in that 7 hours.
If I drink something with an artificial sweetener (not just aspertame, but sucralose as well) if goes through me fast and seems to pull way more liquid out of me then I remember putting in.
Older guys like me, with enlarged prostates, urinate a lot because the damn thing blocks the pee channel. I drink lots of beer and I’m up just about every hour during the night peeing. Beer will do it to you.
Excuse me now, I gotta go take a slash!