Bear Grylls attends the "Celebrity Bear Hunt" Special Screening at the Odeon West End on February 4, 2025 in London, England. (Photo: Mike Marsland / Contributor / WireImage via Getty)
There are a lot of things I like about Bear Grylls. I like his commitment to promoting adventure through Scouting. I also like that his program Man vs. Wild helped get people interested in outdoor survival. But one thing I do not like at all is the way he’s managed to convince the public at large that the solution to every wilderness emergency is to drink their own piss.
While he certainly wasn’t the first adventurer to guzzle his own output, Grylls’s propensity for swallowing pee on camera was so famous that it became a meme in its own right (“Uber’s late? Better drink my own piss.”) Over the course of his show’s seven seasons he did it multiple times, once trying to filter his own urine in the Kalahari Desert and later turning a snakeskin into a makeshift canteen for his morning constitutional in the Sahara.
While the Special Air Service veteran’s show was heavily staged, it’s easy to find news stories citing pee-drinking as a factor in real-life survival stories. “US journalist survived on own urine, popped blister to drink blood after falling down cliff on solo hike” read the headline this August in the New York Post after rescuers located Alec Luhn, an American hiker who had survived six days in the Norwegian backcountry after injuring his ankle. “Man Stranded in Arizona Desert for Two Days Says He Drank Own Urine to Survive,” NBC wrote in 2017. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation was a little more enigmatic in 2022, when it stated that a man from Perth had used a “Bear Grylls-inspired survival technique” after getting lost in a dune field. (Let me spoil this one for you: The survival technique was drinking his own piss.)
Every survival expert I know is pounding their head against their desk reading this, because the truth is that drinking your own urine in a survival situation isn’t just gross, it’s actually counterproductive. As survival instructor and Backpacker writer Jessie Krebs told our Out Alive podcast: “We said 30 years ago in the military, people survive in spite of drinking their urine, not because of it. And this is logical if you really think about it.”
Consider seawater: At roughly 96.5 percent water, it’s still too salty to drink. Try it, and you’ll actually dehydrate faster, as your body pulls water from your tissues to dilute what you’re taking in enough that you can excrete it. Urine is on average only about 95 percent water, with the balance being composed of salts, urea, and other waste products. Imbibe that, and you’ll find yourself in a similar situation as if you had gulped down a glass of the Atlantic. Repeat, and your kidneys will have to work overtime to filter your urine as it becomes more and more concentrated. The end result: kidney damage, failure, and, eventually, death. As the SAS Survival Handbook itself puts it succinctly puts it: “Urine and seawater: never drink either—NEVER!”
If drinking your own pee to survive is such a bad idea, why do lost hikers keep fighting down their gag reflexes to do it? We’re not ruling out desperation—when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail, and when all you have is severe dehydration, any liquid might look potable. The other part of the issue? Five years after its last episode aired, the ghost of Man vs. Wild is still haunting desperate hikers’ brains. As Krebs pointed out in our interview, drinking pee—or eating pine twigs, or covering yourself in elephant dung to keep flies away—may not be a helpful survival technique, but it makes for spectacular reality TV. Unfortunately, the difference between Fear Factor and the grosser parts of your favorite survival show often come down mostly to presentation. And,with funding for wilderness education getting slashed nationwide, Netflix may be the best teacher the general public has available.
The lesson? Sometimes it really is better to leave the stunts to the professionals.
Don’t run out of water. Obvious but true: The best way to avoid getting dehydrated is to make sure you don’t run out of water in the first place. Bring as much as you need—a gallon per person per day, more in hot weather—and consider adding a little extra if you think your hike may run long.
Learn your water sources in advance. Mark reliable water on your map (you brought one, right?) and check the status of seasonal water with locals or rangers if you’re hiking in the desert or somewhere that dries up at certain points of the year.
Use your head. Out of water, hopelessly lost, and far from rescue? Sit down, take a beat, and look around. In the mountains you may be able to find water by heading downhill (you know, the way water runs) toward the canyon or valley bottom. In the desert, all animals tend to collect around the few water sources available, so keep an eye out for their footprints.
Don’t eat. Healthy humans can survive for weeks without eating, and if you don’t have access to water, chowing down will only dehydrate you more. Hang on to that Clif Bar until you’re able to refill your bottle.