If I was stuck in the middle of nowhere, in comfortable/non-sweating temperatures with no sight of water around, but plenty of things to eat such as bugs and berries (which of course can’t support the bodys need for liquid alone), how long can I survive drinking my own urine. Just to make things easier, lets say that I drank the maximum amount of water that my body could hold right before I got stuck out there. I also have a gallon jug with me that is empty in case I find a water hole or to collect rain and obviously to relive myself in to perserve the ‘precious’ fluid.
Sweating aside, I know the body doesn’t output the same amount of liquid that is inputed. Is there anyway to calculate how much I can of the urine I can keep recycling through my body before it is worthless or too filtered to do any good?
I was watching a show last week on about a plane that crashed into the bush in Africa. They went off course before the crash, so the resucue teams were looking in the wrong area. The surviviors not only had to deal with wild animals, but had to drink thier own urine to survive. I beleive that the one woman who was incapacitated (immobile) drank urine for five days and was on deaths door when they found her. It was explained that after recyclying your urine over that length of time it becomes acidic and has a poisionious effect on your body. She lived, but just barely.
In general this is a bad idea because it would dehydrate you faster. Better not to drink anything at all. Your body produces urine because it needs to get rid of the salt and nitrogenous wastes; if you put that stuff back in by drinking it, then you need more water to get rid of it.
Having said that, if you drank huge amounts of water beforehand, then for a couple hours you would basically be urinating nearly pure water. You could probably save it in a container for a couple of days and be OK drinking it. But then if you have a container, why not carry the water in the container instead of in your bladder? Like, duh.
Having said that… your urine isn’t totally useless if you’re out of water. If you have a piece of clear plastic sheeting, you can make a simple solar distilling apparatus like this. Dig a hole, put a can in the bottom, secure the sheet over the top, put a small rock on the sheet so that the surface slopes down toward the can. Now urinate in the soil all around the hole, wait a day or so, and presto, clean water.
Right, what he said. After day one, when your urine is usually mostly OK to drink, it gets worse fast.
Solar stills don’t really work all that well, unless you have plenty of impure water to distill- which is where urine might work.
If I had a bottle, I guess I might as well save my first day’s urine, just in case. However, it could be used to cool you or in a still even later.
So yeah, OP, save that first days “water”. Don’t eat bugs- protiens need water to digest. Do eat the berries if they are even slightly moist. I’d say you would get one more day, maybe two- and even more cash if you survived and sold your story to Outside.
I know it’s a bit off topic, but an easier method (than a solar still) of getting fresh water is to tie a large plastic bag around the end of a leafy branch; plants transport water to their leaves constantly and it evaporates and condenses on the inside of the bag, where it can be collected.
Here’s the deal. Urine is your body’s way of getting rid of stuff it doesn’t want around any more. If you drink it again, all that stuff has to get filtered back out again, in addition to whatever new stuff has come in with your food or from your own biology. So with each trip through your body, your urine is getting more and more concentrated bad stuff in it. I’d guess that’ll kill you faster than dehydration under your scheme.
If you could distill it, great! You’d get the water out of it and leave the bad stuff behind. The only problem is that you’ll never get 100% recovery of the water. So it’s a tradeoff. I don’t really know which direction I’d try to go if I were in that situation, and I’m going to happily stop trying to figure it out now.
The body looses water by sweating, transpiration through the skin, and through the breath. Recyling unrine over any length of time could result in uremic poisoning. In addition the urea content of the urine would increase to the point it would by a last resort for rehydration fluid.
All in all the whole thing is a piss poor idea. :rolleyes:
Be prepared. Take a supply of fresh water along.
Are you perhaps considering accepting a vice-presidential nomination?
I think you may be able to use the first piss as drinkable water since you loaded up on water first.
If you really loaded up on water it may be benificial as you may have depleted salts to get rid of that water
I just wanted to say that I initially mistook the OP’s name as piss_freak, the thread made more sense then.
The Master speaks. (Though not quite exactly directly on topic.)
Cecil’s article mentions “former Indian prime minister Moraji Desai, a daily urine drinker, [who] lived to be 99.” A pair of Time magazine reporters once went to interview him, and he offered them a drink (beverage unspecified). They speedily declined…
To address the question of drinking urine per se.
Urination is the body’s means to rid itself of waste products, principally urea, and defecation to get rid of solid waste products.
I can come up with anr good reason for anyone wanting to ingest either one exept being is desparate circumstances.
Is everybody just going to keep repeating my post over and over, or what? End it already.
Yes. 
Besides, after a while, if you’re really dehydrated, how much urine would you even excrete?
On “Good Eats”, Alton Brown mentioned that you could use sea water to stretch your supply of fresh water. IIRC, you’d want about 4 parts fresh to 1 part salty. This has the added benefit of putting salt back in your body. I would assume that you could do the same thing with urine but I have no idea what the percentages would be.
Well, according to this thread, drinking urine is a highly bad idea because of the waste products in it.