Ode to Sulphur

Oh Sulphur,
how I love thee,
thou art a lure,
and smelly.

Anyway... what do these "foods" have in common:
Garlic
Leeks
Shallots
Onion
Broccoli
Cauliflower
Cabbage
.
.
.
.
Answer? Sulfur!

Or more techincally, they are foods with relatively high concentrations of organic sulphur containing compounds. Why do we care? Well, we care because we looooove biology! (Admit it, you do, formaldehyde and fetal pigs aside.) I'm sure we've all been told that the human body is approximately 102% water. Well, it is. Sorta. And I'm sure we've all eaten olive oil, sunflower oil, safflower oil, canola oil, or fish oil at some point or another. If you're part cat, it's probably the latter. Furthermore, I'm sure we've all been told that oil and water don't mix! Hah! So what happens to the oil? Well... it goes to /dev/null. But not directly. It actually goes to a big box in the centre of your torso called your fat-box. Biologists like to call it your liver, but they're wrong. In a big sack of water (like you and I), there has to be a box to put all the oil/fat in, and it's called the fat-box. Well, in case you've never noticed, you never urinate oil. (Okay, well, at least *I* never have, so I'm assuming you haven't either) So, where does the oil go when it goes into the fat-box? Well, your fat-box likes it when you eat the above sulphur containing foods, because it rips the sulphur groups off what you eat, adds it to the oils, and voila! They're not really oils anymore because they're water-soluble, polar, and have a sulphur (and probably oxygen) containing group on the end. Then what happens? You urinate (in case you didn't get it last time, that's a fancy word for pee) them out in all that water. And NO, that's not why your urine is yellow.


A Special PostScript for Garlic
Garlic, Onion, Leeks, and so on are a bit more special. Take garlic, for example. If you cook an entire clove of garlic in the oven, and then slice it up, it won't smell at all. The chemistry of garlic is such that a chemical reaction occurs when the cells are burst and the contents freely mix. This causes the strong garlic odour. However, if the garlic is heated before the cells are burst, these reactive compounds are broken down before they meet each other, and thus no resulting smelly compound. The resultant smelly compound is the one that is super good for you, however, so you always want to chop, mince, or crush your garlic before cooking. Likewise with onion, I always chop it finely before cooking it.

Oh yeah, and you'll always smell like what you eat, it just so happens that garlic has a super strong odour and travels through tissues well.