What does your pee smell like?

This may venture into the TMI area..but thanks to eating Golden Crisp this morning, I was reminded of it when I took a trip to the bathroom a couple hours later. My pee smells like Golden Crisp. Or Super Sugar Crisp, if you are old enough to remember that name, before the marketing people at Post wanted to hide the sugar content from fretful moms.

And apparently I am not alone. Searching "pee smells like Golden Crisp" brings 87,000 hits on Google. So what's going on? I clicked on the link for one of them, and found this.

Yes, this can happen. What's happening is that your body can't digest the chemicals responsible for the smell and so it basically throws them out, intact, via the kidneys and urine, making the urine smell like cereal. Some artificial dyes will stain your urine funny colours for the same reason, and asparagus is really bad for making your pee stink (but apparently not everybody can smell it). Edit: and yes, it can be strong enough that you can smell it from a good distance.

Oddly enough, the author that I stole the above from mentions asparagus. That is another food that makes my pee stink horribly. This is an even odder topic, from a scientific point of view. Apparently not all people can smell "asparagus pee". As an aside, there are 384,000 hits to "asparagus pee" on Google, so it is even more common I guess. Anyway, apparently 50% of people cannot smell the compound created that ends up in urine after eating asparagus. It's called "Specific Anosmia". So if you eat asparagus, and don't smell anything, you probably have specific anosmia.

HERE is a great article describing the phenomenon regarding asparagus.

I can't think of any other foods that do that to me. What about you, feel free to comment?!?!? In a future post, maybe I'll get in a discussion of what drink mass amounts of purple Powerade does to me.....