URINE DRINKING
You’d probably have to be mighty thirsty to drink your own urine, but millions of people do it every day. Recent research shows it might not be such a crazy idea - and this research could lead us to the “jet lag” pill.
People have been drinking their own urine for thousands of years. A few Prime Ministers of India, Morarji Desai and Mahatma Ghandi, did it every day. According to Paul Keating, Queen Beatrice of The Netherlands actually drank a glass of pig urine on Dutch TV, to “prove” that Dutch pork was of the highest standard.
Some supporters of urine-drinking claim that it is mentioned in the Bible. Proverbs 5: 15 says “Drink thy waters of thine own cistern” , while John 7: 38 says “Out of his belly shall flow rivers of living waters”.
However, some old Indian documents are very definite about the benefits of drinking your own urine.
The ancient yogic text, “Damara Tantra”, refers to a technique called “shivambu kalpa vidhi”, which means literally “urine revitalising technique”. In this text it says “a sensible man gets up early in the morning when three quarters of the night has passed (about 3 or 4 AM), faces east and passes urine. The initial and concluding flow of urine is to be discarded. The intermediate flow is to be consumed. This is the most suitable method”. In other words, drink your own mid-stream urine, very early in the morning. They called this habit “amaroli” - and it was supposed to help them meditate.
But other people claimed medical benefits from urine. As recently as 1863, the habit of injecting urine was mentioned in a book called “The Physiological Memoirs of Surgeon-General Hammond, U.S. Army”. He recommended using a hypodermic needle and syringe.
Today in alternative medicine, the healing use of urine is called “uropathy”. It is claimed to cure everything from cancer to AIDS. It’s used in every form imaginable. Patients are supposed to drink it, squirt it into various body orifices to use it as an enema or a gargle or a douche, dribble it into their eyes and ears as drops,. If they’re a little shy, they can start off with just sniffing urine. Certainly many athletes claim that washing your feet with urine heals blisters very rapidly.
Normally, your body makes about 1 ml of urine per minute - about a small glassful every hour. Urine is about 95% water and about 5% solids. These solids include vitamins, proteins, enzymes, salts, uric acid, prostaglandins, and a recently-discovered hormone called melatonin.
Melatonin is the probably the reason the ancient yogis drank their own urine. Melatonin is made by the pineal gland, which the French philosopher and mathematician Descartes called “the seat of the soul”.
As a drug, melatonin has a wide range of effects. If you eat it or drink it or sniff it, you can get everything from mild sedation, pain relief, sleep, a feeling of “emotional balance”, increased visual imagery, and feelings of elation right up to an alteration in your ability to estimate time. Melatonin is produced by the pineal gland only when your eyes are shut. In your blood, the levels of melatonin peaks around 2 AM, but there are significant quantities made between midnight and 6 AM.
It turns out that beta blockers, a drug commonly given for high blood pressure, prevent this night time release of melatonin. This might explain why beta blockers sometimes cause nightmares.
Now the yogic ritual is to get up at 4 AM, drink your own urine and then meditate. Any urine made after 2 AM is loaded with melatonin, and this melatonin might relieve some of the physical pain of sitting motionless and cross-legged for two hours. It would certainly make your meditation easier if you also had increased visual imagery, and feelings of elation. Also the melatonin helps to reset your body clock, and it fools your body into thinking that it has had enough sleep. In fact, scientists are looking at using melatonin as a pill to protect you against jet lag, by re-setting your body clock.
The yogic texts also say that the urine of children is superior to that of adults. The pineal gland in children produces more melatonin, and this is why children sleep longer than adults. The urine of children has much more melatonin than the urine of adults. The extra melatonin would help the meditation.
The yogic texts also say that you should drink your own urine every day for over a month before you get the full effect. Studies have shown that you need to take melatonin for about a month to lock in your sleep cycles.
So the ancient yogic texts were right. A glass of urine a day could keep the stress away. Drinking your own urine could be very handy if you have a big project coming up, and need to burn the candle at both ends. If urine becomes really valuable, maybe recycled lemonade will cost more than fresh lemonade.
PINEAL GLAND - BIOLOGICAL CLOCK
The pineal gland is a small white gland buried nearly in the centre of the brain. It is shaped like a tiny pinecone, is about 8 mm long, and weighs about the same as a house spider - about one tenth of a gram.
Parts of the pineal gland turn to calcium quite early in life. Doctors who see this calcium on X-rays have long called it “brain sand”. They found it useful as a marker of the mid-line on X-rays of the skull. Brain sand is found in 30% of people aged 10-20 years, and in 80% of people over 30 years old.
During the day, the pineal gland turns tryptophan into serotonin. At night, it converts the serotonin into melatonin - the chemical that helped the early yogis meditate. So the pineal gland turns information about light (and how many hours of light there are each day) into the hormone, melatonin
The pineal gland is quite small in animals that live near the Equator - where the days are always 12 hours long, and the timing for breeding is not so critical. But near the North and South Poles, the timing is more critical, and the pineal gland is larger. In the newborn elephant seal, the pineal gland takes up 50% of the brain weight!
THE HISTORY OF THE PINEAL GLAND
Practically all animals with backbones over the last 500 million years have had a pineal gland. The pineal gland feeds information about the length of the day and the season to the “master clock” elsewhere in the brain.
In the tuatara, the primitive New Zealand lizard, the pineal gland sits just beneath the skin on the skull. In some lizards the pineal gland is exposed to daylight through a clear window on the back of its head. Perhaps the pineal gland is the famous “third eye” of the mystical East.
Herophilus, in the fourth century BC, claimed that the pineal gland was a “valve” that regulated the flow of thought out of little storage bins in the brain.
René Descartes, around 1640, believed that the rational soul lived in the pineal gland. He claimed that information about events in the real world entered the eyes, and then passed by “strings” in the brain to the pineal gland . The pineal gland reacted by sending “humours” down hollow tubes to various muscles of the body . He was very close to the truth.
In 1918, a Swedish anatomist, Nils Holmgren, found that some cells in the pineal gland of the frog and the dogfish were surprisingly similar to the light-detecting cells in the retina.
In 1958, melatonin was isolated by Lerner and his colleagues at Yale University. The chemists took 4 years to extract the melatonin from the collected pineal glands of 200,000 cattle.
MELATONIN - THE DRACULA HORMONE
Scientists call melatonin “The Dracula Hormone” because the blood levels are much higher at night. They also call it “The Hormone of Darkness” for the same reason, and also because we know so little about it.
Daytime blood levels of melatonin (in people of all ages) are 17-43 pmol/l. Nighttime levels depend on your age. They are around 1080 pmol/l in children aged 1-3 years, 520 pmol/l in children and adolescents 8-15 years old, and they gradually drop until they reach levels of about 86 pmol/l in adults aged 50-70 years.
Melatonin production is completely switched off by very bright light (about 2,500 lux). Typical indoor lighting is around 250-500 lux. Outdoor brightness ranges from 10,000 lux (cloudy day in northern Europe) to 80,000 lux (sunny day near the Equator).
JET LAG AND MELATONIN
“Jet lag” is the disruption of your internal body clock. You want your breakfast porridge when everybody else wants dinner. About 15% of travellers never get jet lag, 15% will be bed-ridden by it, while 70% can get by, but don’t feel great. You need about one day to reset your clock from the shock of crossing one time zone. So it will take you 12 days to recover from flying halfway around the world over 12 time zones.
The standard advice depends on which way you are flying. If you are heading EAST over six or fewer time zones, expose yourself beforehand to natural morning light for about 3-4 hours. But if you’re planning to cover more than six time zones, avoid the morning light and get the midday light. If you are heading WEST over six or fewer time zones, expose yourself to natural afternoon light for about 3-4 hours. But if you’re planning to cover more than six time zones, avoid the afternoon light and get the midday light.
But this could all change when the melatonin pill becomes available. If you take melatonin in the morning, it delays your body clock. If you take melatonin in the afternoon or early evening, it advances your body clock. So adjusting for jet lag could be as easy as taking a pill at the right time!
URINE - CLEANER THAN SALIVA?
Most people think that urine is full of germs. They’re wrong - urine has fewer germs than your mouth, or the water you get out of a tap.
Normally, urine is “sterile”. This medical jargon means that there are no significant numbers of bacteria. If you were to take a few millilitres of urine, and add some germ-free food-for-bacteria, no bacteria would grow. But if you were unlucky to have a Urinary Tract Infection, then there would be bacteria in your urine. These bacteria would grow in the presence of bacteria-food. A microbiologist could recognise these bacteria, and test to find which antibiotics would kill them. Then your doctor would prescribe the most appropriate antibiotic.
So while your urine might not seem very delicious or tasty to drink, at least it has fewer bacteria than your own saliva.
URINE-DRINKING IN TAIWAN
About 200,000 Taiwanese drink their own urine every morning. This movement began when Chen Ching-chuan met an old war friend, after 14 years separation. To his surprise, his old friend had not aged. His friend said he had been drinking his own urine - so Mr. Chen followed his example.
Mr. Chen ran into trouble with the local police, when he recently had to apply for a new identification card. He looked 44 years old, not 64 - but luckily, a friend gave the needed identification. The urine-drinking movement is now so popular that it even runs a Urine Therapy Hot Line.
REFERENCES:
“The Pineal Gland” by Richard J. Wurtman and Julius Axelrod, Scientific American, July 1965, pp 50-60
“Melatonin Supplementation from Early Morning Auto-Urine Drinking”, by M. H. Mills and T. A. Faunce, Medical Hypotheses (1991) 36, pp 195-199
“A Glass of Urine a Day keeps the Stress Away” by Gail Vines, New Scientist, No. 1810, 29 February 1992, p.14
Melatonin - the Hormone of Darkness” by Robert D. Utiger, New England Journal of Medicine, Vol 327, No 19, 5 November 1992, pp 1377-1379
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