We’ve all been there — a couple beers and you’re ready for the first piss and then it feels like you spend the rest of the night in bathroom because you’ve got to whizz every five minutes.
“I’m trying not to break the seal, man!” as you piss your pants in the middle of a party.
Is there really such a thing as breaking the seal or is it all in our heads and not really in our bladder. Sort of, according to science.
Here’s what’s going on: “Alcohol is a diuretic, so it makes you excrete fluids and urinate more frequently,” Craig Comiter, a urologist at Stanford Health Care, tells Yahoo Health. “But unlike medical diuretics like water pills, which work on the kidneys by forcing the fluid out of you in order to lower blood pressure or get rid of excess fluid, alcohol suppresses a hormone called the antidiuretic hormone, or ADH.”
Comiter points out that with alcohol you have a one-two punch: You’re both ingesting more fluid and you’re shutting down your body’s natural anti-diuretic hormone, so you have more water loss than usual compared to, say, guzzling just water. “If you drink 12 ounces of beer, you lose more than 12 ounces of fluid because you’re excreting extra water,” he explains.
The average bladder holds about 10-15 ounces of anything so pound a couple beers and it’s all got to go somewhere. After a while, you’re probably better off dumping the beer right into the pisser and cutting out the middle man.
[via Yahoo! Health]