What color should your pee be and what does it mean for your health?
Britt Jones
Featured Image Credit: Getty Stock Images
Ever looked down after urinating and wondered if your pee means something? Well, according to an expert – yes, yes, it does.
The color of your wee is a telling factor when it comes to your health, from kidney issues, to dehydration, and even infections.
Like your stool, the color tells a story of your internal health.
Colleen Muñoz, the co-founder of Hydration Health Center at the University of Hartford, revealed on the Am I Doing It Wrong? podcast, just what it means when you have clear, dark, or yellow pee.
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Raj Punjabi and Noah Michelson, asked the expert during their latest episode, and found out that dehydration isn’t the only dangerous thing to be related to urine and drinking water.
In fact, you might be over hydrated, which can be deadly in some cases.
Muñoz said that most people need to drink between two and four liters of water a day but checking it over with your doctor can’t hurt.
She also noted that things like coffee, tea, juice and even some foods can aid in hydration too, stating that if your urine is a light yellow color like ‘lemonade’, you’re on track.
“I’m not saying that that’s a perfect marker, but it’s a very easily accessible one and it actually gives us a lot of good information,” Muñoz said. “We’re normally looking for, like, a light yellow color — like lemonade or a straw kind of color.”
“That’s one of those things that I still have a lot of people tell me,” she said. “People who are well educated in biology will tell me, like, ‘My urine was clear today, so that’s good, right?’ I’m like, ‘No, no, no, no, no.’ You know, there is such a thing as drinking too much water.”
“[Drinking too much water] is a real thing,” Muñoz, explained, noting that it’s not common, but it can be dangerous.
She said: “[It doesn’t happen] as often as you would think, relative to somebody who is underhydrated — that’s definitely a more common scenario — but it’s something we need to pay attention to.”
Explaining that electrolytes in the body need to stay ‘in balance in order to maintain healthy blood, heart rhythm, muscle function and other important functions,’ she warned that when they ‘get out of whack’, it can cause things like nausea, dizziness, and even death.
According to Scientific American, drinking too much water can result in hyponatremia, which occurs when there is insufficient salt in the blood.
Severe cases of hyponatremia can result in water intoxication.
“If they get too dilute, we start to have some pretty severe ramifications, largely related to our nervous system ... [including] brain swelling, coma, [and then] death ... and pretty quick,” Muñoz said.
Sadly, one woman passed away in 2007 of water intoxication after appearing on a radio station competition to win a Nintendo Wii console.
The goal was to drink as much water as possible within one day.
The 28-year-old woman died after drinking approximately six liters of water in three hours as she took part in the 'hold your wee' challenge.
“Unfortunately they didn’t consult anybody before they did this,” Muñoz said of the radio station.