This is the post that might get me in trouble, or at least impede my getting a job. I’ve tasted my own urine, and it helped me guess that I had diabetes.

I did it on a lark. I was feeling terrible, and having some of the symptoms of diabetes, like thirst. I’d read about urine tasters, and also recalled a story about President Trump being into watching strippers pee. Trump wasn’t accused of tasting pee, but the larger story discussed the urine fetish, and someone had mentioned that their partner had tasted sweetness in their urine, and thought it might be diabetes. It was.

So, I put my finger to the tip of my penis, and gathered a single drop of urine, and then tasted it.

It was sweet, like a diluted soda.

Needless to say, I was not happy with this fact. I was later diagnosed with diabetes.

In the two months since that first time, I’ve tasted my urine maybe 20 more times.

A few times, it was sweet, but less so. It was like water’s sweetness when you finish a cup of soda with ice, and then add water to it. That little bit of soda, diluted in water, was the flavor when blood glucose was fairly high, like 160 mg/dL or more.

More times, it was salty. My urine got salty after eating salty foods. That meant restaurant foods and snacks, for the most part.

If you want to avoid salt, you need to curtail eating at restaurants, and curtail snack foods, in addition to cutting back on the usual salty foods like pickles, cured meats, soups, and cheeses.

The rest of the time, when I was drinking a lot, like a gallon or more a day, it didn’t taste like anything. If it was “salty”, it was not as salty as my perspiration.

So, I have my doubts about articles that say urine normally tastes salty. If I’m drinking adequate water, like 3/4 of a gallon (3 liters) a day, it’s dilute.

As far as other flavors, I have not tasted them. It’s been only degrees of saltyness and a few incidents of sweetness. I do recall one unusual flavor I tasted from the urethra of a woman upon whom I was performing oral sex, but was so long ago that I cannot clearly remember it.

My next step will be to assign a cup as my “urine sample” cup, and buy some more sophisticated urinalysis strips to measure a wider range of chemicals. I have ketone test strips right now. While urinalysis of ketones using test sticks isn’t conclusive, or even accurate, it is some data. It’s not a lack of information, but additional information that augments what you’re tracking about how you’re feeling, what you’re eating, what drugs you’re taking, and so forth.

If you’ve read this far, I suggest reading “Liquid Gold” by Jackie Rosenhek, about the history of urine tasting, and the rise of quack “uromancy” or fortune-telling by reading urine. The article also had a number of facts that could help you analyze your own urine samples.