Entertainment

What Pee Actually Tastes Like, According to the Internet

Like many internet users before her, Cardi B asked, "I wonder how pee taste like ?" We've got the answers.
Bettina Makalintal
Brooklyn, US
a tweet from cardi b that says "i wonder how pee taste like ?" in front of a photo of bubbly yellow-orange liquid
Photo by mesut zengin via iStock/Getty Images Plus; Screenshot via Twitter

Cardi B's clearly having a normal one, having tweeted at 8:06 a.m. one of the most pressing questions of human existence. "I wonder how pee taste like ?," she wrote, with the important follow-up "I’m not hacked I just wonder if it got a bland taste or is it salty." As we look onward onto our day, we can't pretend like the question will just leave us: after all, who among us has not wondered the very same thing, in what might just be our most shameful of thoughts?

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Cardi, you are definitely not alone. The question "what does pee taste like" makes up pages and pages of inquiries on Quora, Reddit, Yahoo Answers, bodybuilding forums, and basically anywhere anyone can post on the internet with even the slightest veneer of privacy. Most of us, however, leave that question as a stupid shower thought, not something we'd actually do.

What does pee taste like?

While we're still not doing, uh, that for the sake of "journalism," plenty of bold souls have given pee drinking a shot, from Man vs. Wild's Bear Grylls to "urine therapy" devotees, who drink pee as a pseudo-health elixir, to urophiles, who just have a kink for it, to the folks over at BuzzFeed because the world of content is a vampire. In the ancient times and Middle Ages, physicians judged health and diagnosed diseases by taking, yup, sips of pee, using urine flavor wheels not unlike today's coffee tasting wheels to identity pee's many flavor profiles. From these centuries of brave work, we can, at the very least, find the best descriptions of what pee actually tastes like. Here they are.

The consensus seems to be that pee tastes salty, which seems kinda like what you'd expect.

Health conditions and diets can make pee taste different—in some cases, better, it seems.

And there are others for whom the taste of pee seems, well, a little reaching—like Fabian Farquharson, a proponent of urine therapy, who told British tabloid The Sun in March, "It was comparable to the taste of bitter ale initially and it felt a bit like the first time I tried beer."

There you have it: salty, bitter, and kinda gross. These people did it, and now you never, ever have to try it yourself. You're welcome, Cardi.