
Listen to the Color of Your Urine
- Health Hub 101, Taboo Topic
- 22 Feb, 2023
Normal urine typically ranges in color from light yellow to deep amber, depending on the concentration or dilution of the urine and a pigment known as urochrome.
Your urine's color can be altered by pigments and other substances found in some meals and drugs. The most likely foods to alter the color are beets, berries, and fava beans. Urine often has vibrant tones, such as red, yellow, or greenish blue, from both over-the-counter and prescription drugs.
An illness may be indicated by an odd urine color. For instance, porphyria, a rare, genetic condition of red blood cells, can be identified by the presence of deep red to brown urine.
Symptoms
The amount of water you consume has an impact on the color of your normal pee. Drinking more makes your urine appear clearer because fluids dilute the urine's yellow pigments. The hue intensifies as you consume less alcohol. Urine that is amber in hue can be produced by severe dehydration.
However, urine can take on hues that are far from typical, such as red, blue, green, dark brown, and cloudy white.
What urine would say about its color, if it could speak:
1. Pale yellow: Healthy urine contains 96% water and only a small amount of additional waste. You should be able to read the paper or computer you are holding on the other side of your urine if it were in a bottle.
2. Completely clear: Since your pee is entirely clear, you probably consumed too much water.
3. Orange/Dark Yellow: The most frequent reason for orange or dark yellow urine is dehydration. Hepatitis can also be indicated by orange urine.
4. Bright, neon-yellow urine: Typically, an overdose of vitamins or dietary supplements causes this. Vitamin B2 cannot be stored in big quantities, therefore extra amounts usually pass through the body all at once.
5. Methylene blue: which is administered in cases of unintentional cyanide poisoning or used to treat urinary tract infections, can also result in blue urine.
6. Green urine: Usually the consequence of bacteria entering the urinary tract by the application of toilet paper in a forward motion as opposed to a backward motion. People who have liver cancer can have green urine.
7. Purple urine: It results from a disease called porphyria, which affects about 30,000 people, mostly in the UK and South Africa.
8. Red or pink urine: Reddish urine is most common due to bleeding in the urinary tract, which can be caused by kidney stones, blows to the kidneys or bladder, or, in rare cases, cancer of the bladder of kidneys.
9. Brown or black urine: Eating certain kinds of beans, especially fava beans or velvet beans, causes darkening of the urine because of their dopamine content. Certain medications for Parkinson's disease likewise have this effect.
10. Cloudy or white urine: Usually it indicates a bacterial infection.
11. Foamy urine: Foamy urine can result from the same causes as cloudy urine, or it can indicate spillover of protein from severely diseased kidneys.
Outside Impacts
It can be alarming to see blood-red urine in the toilet bowl, or green, blue, cloudy. Most of the time, however, there's a non-threatening explanation for urine that comes in all the colors of the rainbow.
Some medications, laxatives, chemotherapy drugs, and even food can change the color of your urine.
Talk to your doctor, if:
- urine color changes lasts longer than a couple of days
- you keep seeing the same color in your urine
Reference:
1. https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/urine-color/symptoms-causes/syc-20367333
2. https://userfiles.steadyhealth.com/images/articles/urine.jpg