If Your Pee Smells Like Popcorn, You Might Have This Common Disease

You can learn some surprising things about your health each time you pee. The color of your pee should be a pale yellow, but a darker yellow could be a sign you're dehydrated. Red or pink urine could either mean blood in your urine or you drank too much beetroot juice. Your pee could also smell like ammonia if you're dehydrated. The smell of your pee after eating asparagus can cause you to hold your nose. 

Do you smell popcorn while you pee? It could be a sign of untreated or undiagnosed diabetes, says Dr. Tania Elliott, a clinical instructor at NYU Langone Health. "The 'popcorn' smell (some people also refer to it as sweet, fruity, or similar to Cheerios) is caused by a combination of excess sugar in the urine as well as ketones," she said. "Ketones are acids that build up when the body is using fat cells to convert to energy instead of glucose (sugar)."

People who fast, exercise often, or follow a low-carb diet might also secrete ketones in their urine, making their pee smell like popcorn. However, people with diabetes could accumulate excessively high levels of ketones in their blood, leading to a life-threatening condition called ketoacidosis.

Type 1 diabetes is a condition where the body doesn't make enough insulin to process blood sugar, and type 2 diabetes occurs when the body doesn't use insulin efficiently. With both types of diabetes, "sugar cannot enter the cells to be converted to energy, so instead the sugar gets stuck in the bloodstream," Dr. Tania Elliott said. That could lead to complications such as damage to the kidneys, eyes, and nerves.

People with type 1 diabetes are more likely to have a problem with excessive ketones in the blood, according to the American Diabetes Association. Ketones can build up if people don't properly take their insulin or don't adjust their insulin while they are sick.

Even if your pee doesn't smell like popcorn, people with diabetes should monitor the levels of ketones in their blood using ketone test strips. Small amounts of ketones in your urine could indicate that your body is starting to accumulate ketones in your blood. If you're experiencing high blood sugar, nausea, difficulty breathing, or brain fog, you should monitor your ketones every four to six hours for possible diabetic ketoacidosis.

Smelling popcorn while you pee could occur periodically if you're dehydrated or following a particular diet. You'll want to see a doctor if it persists for more than a few days, especially if you are diabetic or pregnant. Along with nausea, difficulty breathing, and brain fog, other signs of ketoacidosis include frequent urination despite extreme thirst, fatigue, or fruity-smelling breath. Even if you haven't been diagnosed with diabetes, your doctor can determine if your blood sugar needs to be properly managed.

Although people following intermittent fasting or keto diets will often enter ketosis to burn fat, this isn't the same as ketoacidosis. Ketosis is a metabolic process that occurs when blood sugar is too low, so the body resorts to ketones for fuel. Ketoacidosis is a medical condition that occurs when insulin levels are too low and blood sugar can be high, resulting in too many ketones circulating in the blood. 

However, spending too long in ketosis can be dangerous on the keto diet because you could trigger ketoacidosis. A 2020 article in Clinical Practice and Cases in Emergency Medicine highlighted a case where a 55-year-old woman wound up in the emergency room with diet-induced ketoacidosis after losing 17 pounds in 22 days on a ketogenic diet. The article said that ketoacidosis can occur when you completely remove carbohydrates from your diet.