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The 21st century has been pretty weird. After centuries of scientific advancements, fringe groups have decided they're not a big fan of the dietary advice and ground-breaking medical treatments that have helped extend our lifespans enormously.
Now joining the long list of things humanity is insisting on doing despite knowing better comes "urine therapy". Yes, wellness advocates appear to be adding vaguely medical-sounding terms to bodily secretions to make them sound legitimate.
"Auto-urine therapy" is not new. The practice of drinking your own wee has been around for thousands of years. But then so has being killed by spears in warfare, and nobody is saying that's good for you.
Recently, highlights from a urine therapy Facebook group have gone viral on Twitter, largely because it's really, really grim.
Screenshots from the group show people celebrating the New Year by chugging their own liquid waste from a champagne flute and another took a urine foot bath to celebrate. One person even described the challenges of finding a cup to pee into to continue "therapy" at a house party.
It gets worse.
In a horrible "please don't do this" triple-whammy, one man shared a photograph of himself soaking his feet in a urine foot bath and letting his dog lick it off his feet whilst staring directly at the Sun.
Understandably, people were pretty disgusted by the whole thing.
In one particularly horrifying post, one member wrote: "anyone else's month old urine taste exactly like beer?... an acquired taste."
There are, of course, no benefits to drinking your own urine (or anyone else's). It is liquid waste, containing products your body has actively tried to rid you of. Reintroducing them into your body puts unnecessary strain on your kidneys as they have to do the filter job twice.
Contrary to popular belief, urine is also not sterile. Bacteria are present in your urine at low-levels while inside your body. This idea comes from a urinary tract infection test from the 1950s that gave patients a "negative" result for bacteria in the urine if they have less than 100,000 colony-forming units (viable bacteria or fungal cells) in their sample. People have taken "negative" to mean urine is sterile, when it's far from it.
Unless this man is freezing and thawing his urine, he's been leaving microbes and bacteria to cultivate in his urine for a month before introducing them back into his body (which to us sounds quite a dangerous thing to do even with a normal drink).
Sadly, this group is far from alone, with urine therapy advocates all over the Internet. This group is just the tip of a rather yellow-looking iceberg.
