Whenever I eat asparagus, my pee smells like asparagus afterward. Just wanted to share that with you.
Anyone know why?
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The effect of eating asparagus on the eater’s urine has long been observed. Marcel Proust claimed that asparagus “…transforms my chamber-pot into a flask of perfume.” [16] Certain compounds in asparagus are metabolized giving urine a distinctive smell due to various sulfur-containing degradation products, including various thiols, thioesters, and ammonia.[17] Derivatives of asparagusic acid are also found in urine. The speed of onset of urine smell has been estimated to occur within 15-30 minutes of ingestion.[18] Observational evidence from the 1950s showed that many people did not know about the phenomenon of asparagus urine. It was originally thought this was because some of the population digested asparagus differently to others, so that some people excreted odorous urine after eating asparagus, and others did not. However, in the 1980s three studies from France, China and Israel published results showing that producing odorous urine from asparagus was a universal human characteristic. The Israeli study found that from their 307 subjects all of those who could smell ‘asparagus urine’ could detect it in the urine of anyone who had eaten asparagus – whether or not they could detect it in their own.[citation needed] Thus, it is now believed that most people produce the odorous compounds after eating asparagus, but only about 40% of the population have the autosomal genes required to smell them.
September 24th, 2008 at 11:49 am
Gross. But true. From wikipedia:
The effect of eating asparagus on the eater’s urine has long been observed. Marcel Proust claimed that asparagus “…transforms my chamber-pot into a flask of perfume.” [16] Certain compounds in asparagus are metabolized giving urine a distinctive smell due to various sulfur-containing degradation products, including various thiols, thioesters, and ammonia.[17] Derivatives of asparagusic acid are also found in urine. The speed of onset of urine smell has been estimated to occur within 15-30 minutes of ingestion.[18] Observational evidence from the 1950s showed that many people did not know about the phenomenon of asparagus urine. It was originally thought this was because some of the population digested asparagus differently to others, so that some people excreted odorous urine after eating asparagus, and others did not. However, in the 1980s three studies from France, China and Israel published results showing that producing odorous urine from asparagus was a universal human characteristic. The Israeli study found that from their 307 subjects all of those who could smell ‘asparagus urine’ could detect it in the urine of anyone who had eaten asparagus – whether or not they could detect it in their own.[citation needed] Thus, it is now believed that most people produce the odorous compounds after eating asparagus, but only about 40% of the population have the autosomal genes required to smell them.
September 26th, 2008 at 10:41 am
I feel the same way about Cheerios.