Dear Worried,
There is nothing wrong with you. Not everyone has smelly urine shortly after eating asparagus, but many do. About half of the population will notice this odor after eating asparagus because of the sulfur-containing amino acids which break down after ingestion.
As archived in the Boston Globe (
www.boston.com), below are more details about why asparagus causes urine to have a unique odor:
Sulfur-containing amino acids in asparagus break down during digestion, creating an odor when urine is excreted.
"It's the same sulfur group that makes skunks smell," said Barbara Hodges, a dietician with Boston University's nutrition clinic, the Evans Nutrition Group (Hodges cited in Boston.com, 1994).
However, not everyone has the urine odor or perhaps not everyone can smell it. "There's something of a dispute," said Dr. David Stollar, chairman of biochemistry at Tufts University Medical School (Stollar cited in Boston.com, 1994). Some scientists think only half of the population can break down the sulfurous amino acids into their smellier components. Other scientists think that asparagus is digested the same by everyone, but that only half can smell the odor.
The unusual urine smell is nothing to worry about because
"the syndrome does not have any pathological significance" (Dictionary of Medical Syndromes cited in boston.com, 1994).
