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Does The Secret To Health Lie In Things Like Yellow Snow?
-Bear Grylls, survivorman
Eating yellow snow is something your mom told you never to do. But what would happen if you did? What if you were stuck in a survival situation? Is urine bad for you? Is it toxic? Is it fattening?
Why is urine yellow?In the Middle Ages, some European alchemists thought urine was yellow because it contained gold. This led to fruitless, and probably disgusting, efforts to extract the precious mineral. The yellow color in urine is actually the same yellow you see on bruises, and what also makes your feces brown. Bilirubin is a product of old red blood cells that is partly broken down in the liver and stored in the gall bladder. Most of it is released into our intestines and broken down further, causing our poo to have its hue. Some remains in the bloodstream and is converted to urobilin by the kidneys, and this is what gives our flush its blush.
What’s in your pee?Urine is composed of about 95% water and 5% nitrogenous waste from protein breakdown. Nitrogen from protein degradation forms ammonia, a compound so toxic that only a tiny bit can be tolerated. So our livers quickly convert any ammonia in our bloodstream to urea, which in turn is removed by the kidneys and concentrated in our urine. Urea makes up only 2% of our urine, and the nitrogen it contains can be used to fertilize plants. Industrial urea is produced by the millions of tons, but if sources become scarce one day, your urine will literally be worth gold.
And if you need to protect your liquid wealth, you can always make gunpowder out of your pee. Urea can be broken back down into ammonia, producing that rank pee smell of back-alley dumpsters, and further oxidized by bacteria to make urea nitrate, an essential ingredient in high explosives. Urine also contains a bit of creatinine, a breakdown product of creatine phosphate found in muscles that is used by urologists — professional pee doctors — to assess proper kidney function. The rest of your urine is made up of mineral salts, enzymes, fatty acids, carbohydrates, and hormones — basically the stuff primordial soups are made of.