Once when visiting a friend’s home, I came across an entertaining volume called “What Your Poo Says About You,” a lighthearted book about the amateur analysis of fecal matter for one’s own insight and entertainment. Admittedly, few people would want to talk about such matters in public–though I happen to know two such people personally who are not old, where it is a more general habit–but another related habit of mine that seems a bit more unusual is the practical examination of one’s urine. As is the case with the analysis of feces, analyzing urine is a useful source of self-knowledge in understanding the state of one’s body, and if it is not a subject that most people would want to talk about to others, it is an important element in intrapersonal knowledge as it gives us an idea of how our body is holding up in the face of our eating habits or the environment around us.

There are at least a few aspects of urine analysis are useful and practical for people to do on a regular basis as a means of assessing their health without requiring any sort of more formal chemical analysis of the kind done in labwork. On a multiple-time daily basis, there are several aspects of urine that I regularly examine. For one, there is the amount of urine that is being processed. Typically, I find that hours after meals my kidneys will take their sweet time processing urine, but when they finally do there is typically a large amount of it, which makes sense given my efforts to drink a large amount of water on a regular basis as a means of improving my health and flushing out my body’s alarming and unwelcome tendency to hoard uric acid. After the amount, the next most obvious thing to note in one’s urine is the color. Typically, colors closer to clear indicate that the body is well-hydrated, and darker colors signify deeper and deeper dehydration. Despite the amount of water that I drink personally, I seldom find my urine gets lighter than yellow, which is usually a sign to me that as much water as I drink, my body could usually use a bit more. When I find myself recovering from gout attacks, I tend to find as well that my urine has a film on the top that has a crystalline pattern that I can recognize that appears to come from the uric acid crystals that are being processed in the urine and removed from my body little by little. When in the past I was recovering from depression, I would notice that the presence of foul-smelling proteins in my urine was associated with improved mood, indicating that something foul was being removed from my body and improving the state of my mental as well as presumably physical well-being.

Although it is rare, occasionally I have found that urine and its practical at-home analysis has been the cause of interesting conversations between myself and others. When I was a university student, for example, one of my neighboring dormmates found that his habit of drinking a lot of energy drinks was giving his urine a strange color, which indicated to him that he should cease drinking them, which I took to be a wise course of action. More recently, I found myself discussing with a dear friend who happens to be a nurse concerning my own tendency to feel particularly sleepy during times that my body was processing a lot of urine, which was convenient in getting to sleep at night, but was less so earlier in the evening after dinner on Sabbath or during the week when I wanted to get things done in the middle of the day but found it difficult to do so because my kidneys were operating and making me feel drowsy for hours at a time. I found it interesting that this was by no means a unique personal tendency, even if I find it to be a tad bit concerning.

There is much to be said for the value of a more professional cytological examination of urine. As someone who worked for a while in the cytology department of a local laboratory when I was a university student, I found myself organizing lab samples as well as discussing with doctors the need to retake samples when they did not pass quality muster, making me a person that doctors did not particularly want to talk to as my phone call would lead to awkward scheduling of new lab tests and unpleasant admissions that there was a failure to collect previous samples properly in the first place. When done properly, though, urine analysis can reveal diseases, disclose drug use (which appears to be its main use from my own personal observation), and also give doctors useful data about how the patient’s kidneys are or are not processing fluids well. If this knowledge is not always pleasant, it is definitely useful to know how one’s body is operating.