The age-old question, answered thanks to messyepicure.
If you notice an unusual aroma to your pee after you eat asparagus, you aren’t alone. And if you don’t? Well, it still might stink like fresh-cut-grass-thrown-on-a-garbage-dump...at least to some of us. The culprit is asparagusic acid, a chemical compound that science is still trying to crack.
What we do know is that atomically, the key to many bad smells is sulfur, and asparagusic acid comes loaded with a double barrel of stinky sulfur in the form of a disulfide bond—two sulfur atoms attached to one another."Some sulfur compounds are toxic at high levels, and we’ve naturally evolved so that [sulfur] doesn’t smell good to us, so we stay away from it," Whitehead explains.
Two of the other suspects are dimethyl sulfide and dimethyl disulfide, which reek of cooked cabbage and strong garlic, respectively. At higher concentrations, they smell unbearably awful, and they’re two of the more common objectionable rendering-plant odors Whitehead works to get rid of."They’re part of a sort of a suite of chemicals that are small enough and stinky enough that they turn up in a lot of these places," he says.
About a quarter of 23andMe’s subjects say they can’t smell asparagus pee at all, and Lehman estimates that somewhere between 20-40% of people have the associated genetic variation for asparagus anosmia. Arun by public health researchers at Harvard in 2016 that used a stricter definition of being able to smell the odor found that slightly more than half of people don’t detect the aroma of asparagus pee.
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