"Pam Moore" wrote in message
news
On Sat, 23 Aug 2008 19:31:39 +0100, "Mary Fisher"
wrote:


They have to be the most delicious of all veg, though. To me, barely
steamed, they exemplify the flavour of the colour green :-)

Cat(h)

and without meaning to be vulgar, gives the urine the most awful stench,


Has anyone a scientific explanation of why this happens? What does
asparagus have that nothing else does?

Pam in Bristol

Taken from Wiki so don't know how accurate it is, but my husband certainly
cant smell mine! or his own, and I've always forgotten to go and smell his
after....oh dear, what a strange thing to be talking about!!!

The effect of eating asparagus on the urine of some people has long been
known. Marcel Proust claimed that asparagus "...transforms my chamber-pot
into a flask of perfume." Certain compounds in asparagus are metabolized
giving urine a distinctive smell due to various sulfur-containing
degradation products, including various thiols, thioesters, and ammonia.[16]
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.[17] 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.[18][19][20]