If you're going to be lost in the wilderness, you probably don't want Bear Grylls with you.
The Man vs. Wild host has built a brand of survivalist techniques and TV shows.
His tips make for decent TV, but as survival advice, they're kind of terrible.
Here's the worst advice Bear Grylls has given.
There's a reason why the FDA says you should cook meat to a safe minimum internal temperature.
It's because raw meat can make you sick.
Sure, you've seen Bear Grylls eat raw meat on TV, but you don't know what was happening
to him gastrointestinally a couple days later, and that's reason enough for caution.
It might be tempting to think that bacteria like salmonella and E. coli are mostly just
a problem in overcrowded factory-farming conditions, but the Illinois Department of Public Health
says those dangerous microbes can also be found in wild game.
And if the vomiting and explosive diarrhea doesn't finish you off when you're out there
without access to clean water and a toilet, the parasites probably will.
So you're out hiking one day, you turn a corner, and there's a bear standing in the trail.
You have two options.
Do you A) remain calm, keep quiet, and wait for it to move away, or B)
throw food at it?
We're going to guess that you probably would lean toward Option A. But that's not what
Grylls would recommend.
Grylls' reasoning was that throwing a pack full of food at the bear would create a distraction.
The bear will check out the pack and you'll be able to make your escape.
But when you throw food at a bear, you've just let him know that you are a willing source
of food.
That's maybe not what you want.
According to the Roanoke Appalachian Trail Club, many bears are wary of people and will
probably move away on their own.
An aggressive bear may require active deterrence, so stamping your feet, waving sticks around,
and making yourself look big can be effective, but your best defense is to carry bear spray
whenever you are in bear country.
The Colorado Parks and Wildlife organization says it best:
"Convince the bear that you're not worth the trouble.
Black bears are naturally shy and retiring, and even a sow with cubs will most likely
retreat when confronted."
Don't throw your food-filled pack at the bear because that's just stupid.
Bear Grylls sometimes picks up a leech or two.
It happens when you're swimming around in jungle waters, and when you deliberately put
leeches on yourself so you can gross out your audience.
In one episode of Man vs. Wild, Grylls falls in a river in Borneo.
After surfacing, he finds a leech stuck to his midriff and gives the audience some truly
bad advice:
“The best thing to do is grab him by the head and then twist him off."
But Borneo Eco Tours says that's a terrible idea, because when you pull on a leech, it
might regurgitate into your open wound.
Leech vomit in an open wound is generally considered bad and can cause much bigger problems
than just having a leech attached to you.
So what should you do if you do happen to find yourself covered with leeches?
Either put up with it for the 20 minutes or so the leech needs to fill up, or use your
fingernail to gently push the leech's sucker until it detaches.
Once you've detached the oral sucker, you'll need to also detach the posterior sucker,
at the fat end of the leech.
Then you can throw it back into the river while shrieking in horror.
Bear Grylls does a lot of terrifying things, but this one is probably the worst.
The mere thought that you could one day get lost in the wilderness and have to drink your
own urine to survive is enough to make a lot of people want to give up on nature forever.
The first time Grylls did this he was running short on water in the Australian wilderness.
"It may seem disgusting, but your own urine is safe to drink."
So is he right?
If so, everyone who has ever died of thirst is a sucker because they had a perfectly good
source of water and didn't even know it.
According to Slate, Grylls is only sort of right.
Provided you're healthy, your urine is sterile and about 95 percent water.
But the other 5 percent is the part you have to worry about.
There's also nitrogen, calcium, and potassium in your urine, which is the stuff your kidneys
were trying to get rid of in the first place.
So if you drink your urine once, you're probably fine.
But if you keep doing it, those waste products will become concentrated, forcing your kidneys
into overdrive.
After a few days, your kidneys will probably fail and you'll die.
You may have heard that following a stream is a good, basic plan for finding your way
out of the wilderness.
But the trouble with following streams is they don't always meander gently along until
they finally arrive at civilization.
Sometimes they plummet over a pile of rocks into a pool 10 feet below.
In an episode of Bear Grylls: Escape from Hell, Grylls is re-enacting a scenario in
which a lost hiker climbs down a waterfall.
He uses what appears to be a tree root to get close to the pool below, and then he jumps.
Now, it's worth remembering that Grylls almost certainly knew how deep that pool was, but
he doesn't actually say that either he or his producers had already walked down to it
from the safe side and checked it out - which could give impressionable viewers the idea
that jumping blindly into a pool at the bottom of a waterfall is no big deal.
But there's more than just pool depth to consider - as North Carolina State Parks points out,
the rocks around a waterfall are usually more slippery than they look.
So for goodness sake, just go around the waterfall.
Maybe you'll add 10 or 20 minutes onto your ordeal, but you also won't break every bone
in your body and die from hypothermia.
Besides questionable survival techniques, Bear Grylls is also known for building things
out of random objects he happens to find in the wilderness.
Not that we doubt the reality of his reality show or anything, but sometimes Bear's finds
do seem a little suspicious.
Like that time he found the wreckage of a hang-glider in the desert and used it to build
some weird parachute-powered car.
That wreckage did not look like it had been out there in the desert for more than an hour
or two, which makes us seriously doubt the accuracy of Bear's show.
Then there was the time Grylls scavenged electrical wire from a downed utility pole and used it
to make a rope.
Now anyone with a brain understands that you don't approach downed power lines, and you
certainly don't try to salvage wire from them.
Because even if they look like they're not electrified, you really have no way of knowing
that until you touch them, and you really shouldn't be touching downed wires at all.
In another of Gryll's most memorable moments, he disembowels a dead camel and then climbs
inside the carcass.
He doesn't sleep in the camel or anything, but he does tell his audience that a disemboweled
camel is a great place to shelter during a sandstorm.
Never mind that it takes hours to disembowel a camel, so it's not like it's a speedy solution
to an incoming sandstorm.
Weirdly, we were unable to locate any scientific studies on the advisability of sheltering
inside dead animals.
We're going to guess that the fresher your disemboweled camel is, the better.
Beyond that, though, you're not Luke Skywalker, and there's no chance you're ever going to
get a starring role in The Empire Strikes Back, so you can just cross that one off the
list.
Also, wild animals are attracted to dead carcasses, so you really don't want to be inside one
when the jackals show up.
Finally, animal carcasses that have been baking for hours in the hot sun are full of bacteria
and other things that can make you sick, especially if you happen to somehow touch any of the
dead decomposing parts of the camel as you're climbing inside.
One time, Bear Grylls ate a camel spider.
Now, from an anthropological perspective, eating large spiders isn't really that strange.
There are people South America who regularly eat tarantulas, and some even use tarantula
fangs as handy little toothpicks at the end of the meal.
So maybe that's why Bear Grylls decided it just wasn't shocking enough to simply eat
a live spider.
“I'm not particularly looking forward to eating this one, but it's gonna be good."
First, the spider he ate wasn't technically a spider at all, but a camel spider.
Camel spiders are solpugids, so they sort of look like a cross between a spider and
a scorpion.
Also, camel spiders are venomous - their venom won't usually kill a person, but it hurts.
Getting bit by one would hurt.
Getting bit by one in your throat while it's on its way down to your stomach would hurt
a lot.
So you'll at least be happy to know that Grylls chopped off the biting part before he ate
it, but it was totally still squirming.
We're sure he had a very good reason for not waiting for the thing to die before eating
it.
Maybe spiders lose their nutritional value immediately after death?
Nope.
We can't think of a single logical reason why one might need to do that.
There is never a good reason to eat a live spider.
Bear Grylls runs around a lot.
He's also does a lot of climbing things, rappelling down things, building things, swinging over
things, and paddling things.
And doing a lot of calorie-burning things is really not a great idea when you're lost
because you've just given all your beef jerky to a bear and giant camel spiders are scarce
in the American wilderness.
Unless you have an infinite source of food, or you're really good at hunting and game
is super-abundant in the place where you happen to be, lost people have to conserve calories.
Running around is great for staying fit, but in the absence of sustenance it's not great
for staying alive.
In fact survivalist Jason Marsteiner doesn't even recommend hunting because it may burn
more calories than it provides.
Instead, Marsteiner says, eat a handful of cooked bugs.
You'll get more calories from bugs than from meat you've burned calories to get.
So there is one ridiculously terrible thing Bear Grylls does that overshadows climbing
waterfalls, scavenging power lines, and throwing meat at bears.
Even worse than drinking his own urine or climbing inside a camel corpse.
In fact, pretty much everything Bear Grylls does in his television show is incredibly
dangerous and poor advice for surviving outdoors.
But the one thing he does that really is the worst advice of all is risk-taking.
Because as long as you have no broken bones, no raging case of explosive sickness, no spider
bites inside your throat, and you haven't electrocuted yourself, you just might be able
to walk back to civilization.
If you do stupid things and get injured, though, you're going to freeze to death in a ravine
somewhere, or get eaten by that grizzly bear once he's finished off your backpack full
of beef jerky.
Bear Grylls knows this, too.
In fact he once told an Outside Magazine writer that he was perfectly aware how bad his advice
is.
It does, however, make for great advice.
Thanks, Bear.
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