Weird Foods and Your Body

Garlic makes your breath stink. Onions can make you cry. And we all know beans are that magical fruit. But some foods do some seriously weird stuff to your body.

Take asparagus. It's tasty, but you may have noticed a not so delicious side effect, stinky pee. Even people like Ben Franklin and novelist Marcel Proust noticed. Proust wrote that asparagus "Transforms my chamber pot into a flask of perfume." Oops. Oh, sorry.

It's all thanks to a chemical called, believe it or not, asparagusic acid. Your body breaks it down into stuff that smells like sulfur, which shows up in your pee. Or maybe you eat asparagus, but have no clue what I'm talking about. Some people can't detect the smell. It might be that their pee doesn't stink, or that their noses can't pick up on it. No one knows. Weird.

Then there's the beet pee, or technically beeturia. About 15% of beet eaters see red in the toilet after they have them. Scary looking, but don't call 911. There's no need for that. The pigment that makes beets red can sometimes survive the trip all the way through your body. And if you have to go number two, well, the beet goes on.

OK, enough about pee and poop. Let's get trippy. If you're looking for a totally radical experience for your taste buds, let me introduce you to the miracle fruit.

This little berry has the power to change sour and bitter flavors into sweet ones. How? It actually changes the shape of your sweet taste buds. So even though you know it's vinegar, your brain thinks honey.

Is that enough? Oh, it's too much Oh. Pretty good. Mm. That was good. I could eat this as like a meal. Cheese, please. Taste good. It has like is sweet tinge to it.

I am very sensitive to spice, so we will see what this does to me. I don't taste-- it tastes like a red bell pepper. Oh, there it is. It just kicked in.

The next time these foods wind up doing weird stuff to your body, you won't have to wonder what's up with that. Bon appetit.