Like millions of people, Jairam Singhal has diabetes.
Unlike most of those people, he chooses to treat it in a manner most people might find repulsive: Drinking cow urine.
Every morning for the past 10 years, Singhal, 42, has guzzled down a glass of pee harvested fresh from a virgin cow at a cattle shelter near his home in Agra, India.
As gross as his medicine sounds, he swears by cow urine therapy.
"I had diabetes, but ever since I have started drinking cow urine, my diabetes levels have been under control," he said, according to the Mirror. "Someone told me drinking cow urine is good for health.
"We have had cows here for over 12 years now, so first thing in the morning we take cow urine and drink it."
As a Hindu, Singhal believes that cows are sacred animals.
However, he said that the cow urine craze is relatively recent.
"Lots of people come here. And of late, the numbers have been rising. We all gather in the morning and drink fresh urine that Mother cow offers us," Singhal said, according to the Daily Mail. "Just a few years ago, there would hardly be anyone interested in taking cow urine from our shelter. "But today lots of people come to our cow shelter. There are cancer patients sometimes -- they want to see the benefits of cow urine."
He is hoping to spread the so-called benefits of cow urine by putting it into eye drops, soaps, toothpaste and stomach medicine.
Hindu priest Ramesh Gupta stresses that not every cow's pee is holy.
"The cow, whose urine one has to drink, should be a virgin -- she must not have delivered a calf. Also, the urine is to be collected just before sunrise -- that urine has the best effect," he said.
Urine therapy has been practiced since the ancient Romans used pee as a tooth whitener.
Drinking urine is relatively safe, but there's a wee problem with the claims of people like Singhal and Gupta: There's no proof it works on diseases like diabetes or cancer.
In 2008, the American Cancer Society declared that the "available scientific evidence does not support claims that urine or urea given in any form is helpful for cancer patients."
There is another side effect to drinking cow urine that Jessica Simpson discovered while filming her 2010 VH-1 reality series "The Price Of Beauty."
"In Mumbai, we drank cow urine because it detoxes you and it's good for your skin," Simpson said. "I puked that up like all over the place."
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