Planning to drink in the new year - get some asparagus extract

**Little bit** · 12-27-2012, 02:58 PM

According to the Institute of Food Technologists (IFT), the amino acids and minerals found in asparagus extract may alleviate alcohol hangover and protect liver cells against toxins:

Eating Asparagus May Prevent a Hangover, Study Suggests
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases...1226101227.htm

Not sure if eating asparagus shoots will do the trick or not, but for those of us not fond of the vegetable, asparagus extract seems ideal.

...analyzed the components of young asparagus shoots and leaves to compare their biochemical effects on human and rat liver cells. "The amino acid and mineral contents were found to be much higher in the leaves than the shoots," says lead researcher B.Y. Kim.

I may consider taking this routinely from now on and trying it on my son:

Asparagus officinalis is a common vegetable that is widely consumed worldwide and has long been used as an herbal medicine due to its anticancer effects. It also has antifungal, anti-inflammatory and diuretic properties.

A recent study showed diuretics to be very promising in treating autistic symptoms:

A promising clinical trial to reduce the severity of autistic disorders
http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-1...disorders.html

**Scarlet Ibis** · 12-27-2012, 11:07 PM

This is probably TMI, but I wonder if it makes the urine smell bad like regular asparagus does.

**Little bit** · 12-28-2012, 11:38 AM

Good catch Scarlet Ibis, totally forgot about that. 23andme says A carriers of rs4481887 are more likely to detect asparagus scent, or methanethiol, and I am AG. I actually bought some and am trying it, and my genotype say's "Moderately higher odds of smelling asparagus in one's urine." So, well, see...

**Ezana** · 12-28-2012, 10:57 PM

Interesting. I'm GG, so thankfully it's not as pungent for me!

**Scarlet Ibis** · 12-29-2012, 06:03 AM

Just a random factoid: The ability to smell asparagus in the urine was supposedly one of the curious things that inspired Linda Avey, and Anne Wojcicki to start up 23andme. I read about it in an article years ago, when the test was still $999. Ooooh, how far we've come in price since then. Thank goodness.

http://www.wired.com/medtech/genetic...urrentPage=all

The question was surely strange. In February 2005, Anne Wojcicki sat down at the so-called Billionaires' Dinner, an annual event held in Monterey, California, and asked her tablemates about their urine. She was curious whether, after eating asparagus, they could smell it when they urinated. Among those at her table were geneticist Craig Venter; Ryan Phelan, the CEO of DNA Direct, a San Francisco genetic-testing company; and Wojcicki's then-boyfriend (and now husband), Sergey Brin, cofounder of Google. Most could pick up the smell of methyl mercaptan, a sulfur compound released as our guts digest the vegetable. But some had no idea what Wojcicki was talking about. They had, it seems, a genetic variation that made the particular smell imperceptible to them.

Soon, the conversation turned to a growing problem: While researchers are amassing great knowledge about certain genes and genetic variations, there is no way for people to access that data for insights about themselves and their families — to Google their genome, as it were. As a biotech and health care analyst at Passport Capital, a San Francisco hedge fund firm, Wojcicki knew that the pharmaceutical industry was already at work on tailoring drugs to specific genetic profiles. But she was intrigued by the prospect of a database that would compile the available research into a single resource.

Linda Avey wasn't at the dinner, but she wished she had been when she read about it later that year in David Vise and Mark Malseed's book, The Google Story. At the time, Avey was an executive at Affymetrix, the company that had pioneered some of the tools for modern genetic research. For nearly a year, she had been mulling the idea of a genotyping tool for consumers, one that would let them plumb their own genome as well as create a novel data pool for researchers. She even had a placeholder name for it: Newco. "All the pieces were there," Avey says. "All we needed was the money, as usual, and computational power." Two things that Google has plenty of. Around the time she read Vise and Malseed's book, Avey had a dinner scheduled with a Google executive. She asked Wojcicki to join them, and the two quickly hit it off. Within a few months, they had settled on the idea behind 23andMe: Give people a look at their genome and help them make sense of it. (The company's name is a reference to the 23 pairs of chromosomes that contain our DNA.)