color of urine

eurotrotter

ujst wondering shoudl teh color of ones urine vary a lot?
i fit does what does it mean?
I think i drink a lot of water/fluids, so it strikes me as a little odd when its yellow in colour, when im just after drinking a 300ml serving of water say
thanks for your time

WindSock

Healthy urine should be a bit yellowey like the colour of straw, as far as I know.

oneeyedsnake

Generally it varies due to your level of hydration, the more hydrated you are the clearer your urine. The color can also vary due to jaundice,porphyria , kindney infection/stones, and your diet among other things. It takes a while for water to be absorbed by the gut so it natural that there should be a small time lag between drinking water and the color becoming lighter.

eurotrotter wrote:

i fit does what does it mean?

What do you mean?

WindSock

Do you take Multi vitamins? one of the ingredients (maybe vit C) makes your pee orange.

DrIndy

The primary colour in urine is urea and if you eat a lot of protein or are dehydrated, then urine gets darker, it can even go brown if you are bad enough.

It varies with people, but a sustained high intake of water or other liquids will dilute urine more.

Urine is also coloured depending on what you eat - Riboflavin or Vitamin B2 (not vitamin C) has an intense yellow colour and taking vitamin supplements will colour your urine bright yellow. Beetroot in large enough quantities will colour it red/orange. Certain medicines like rifampicin for TB will colour urine orange/red and in fact, checking urine samples is how you make sure people are taking their tablets!

There are other food dyes which make it to the kidneys unprocessed by the liver and also colour urine, but can't remember which they are.

Jimoslimos

DrIndy wrote:

The primary colour in urine is urea

Are you sure on this, I always thought urea was colourless (I'll test this to confirm) and the colour came from the breakdown of bilirubin (in the same way that faeces is brown)

DrIndy

oh yeah.........

Its caused by urochrome which is a degradation product of bilirubin, I stand corrected.

Incidentally, eating asparagus turns urine green and rhubarb makes is orange. Blue food dye can turn urine blue.

Zillah

DrIndy wrote:

Blue food dye can turn urine blue.

Who would have guessed

DrIndy

Zillah wrote:

Who would have guessed

Depends on the dye, you need one that is cleared by the kidneys - if the liver gets there first then its a no go unfortunately.....

InFront

Sometimes beetroot can make a person's urine turn red, as though there were blood in it.

That would be pretty scary if you did not know what was happening:eek:

sudzs

Nothing worse than having a pee and seeing it bright luminous yellow! :eek:

That's the B Complex vits for ya!!!

Or with a really bad dehydration hangover it can become worringly dark...

But agree with previous poster, urine should be the colour of straw... pale yellow.

Tree

looks like serum for hte most part, unless you're a chick on the pill, then your serum is a decidely greeny colour and your urine doesnt match it