Drinking urine: How healthy is urine therapy?

by Flo December 25, 2025

written by Flo December 25, 2025

Alternative practitioners in particular believe that drinking urine is healthy for the human body. The medical view on this is different.

Autologous urine therapy is neither healthy nor harmful

If a healthy person drinks their urine, it will not cause them any harm. However, the body does not benefit in any way from this practice.

Urine contains only components that the body no longer needs or can no longer utilize. It contains nothing that is beneficial to our organism.
In healthy people, urine can be sterile, but this is not always the case. Even healthy people can have bacteria in their urine. Therefore, drinking your own urine is generally not recommended.
If you take medication regularly, your urine may contain chemical residues. The kidneys excrete any excess active ingredients that the body has. If you reabsorb these through your own urine, you are simply making your kidneys work twice as hard.
It is often claimed that urine therapy strengthens the immune system. This assumption is incorrect. Supplying your body with its own waste products has no effect on the immune system.
If people feel healthier and stronger as a result of urine therapy, this may be due to a placebo effect. The effectiveness of the therapy has not been scientifically proven.
However, in certain medical emergencies, such as extreme dehydration, drinking urine can be life-saving in the short term, although it is generally not recommended.

Now that we have addressed the question of whether drinking urine is healthy, we will explain exactly what urine is.

Urine is produced in the kidneys. Here, blood from the entire body is first roughly filtered. All blood components up to a certain size are filtered out.
In addition, the so-called primary urine is produced there. It contains all metabolic waste products and foreign substances in the blood, such as excess vitamins. In other words, everything that the body no longer needs. However, it also contains substances that the body can still utilize. The kidneys produce between 150 and 180 liters of primary urine per day.
In the second step, the kidneys recover the usable components from the primary urine. Fluids such as water are also recovered. Of the 180 liters of primary urine, only one or two liters of urine are excreted per day.
Put simply, the kidneys are the body’s sewage treatment plant. The urine that is excreted contains only components that the body can no longer utilize.
The composition of urine can vary depending on diet, health status, and time of day.