That's Fit

I have been both shivering with disgust and giggling my head off all day today. I grabbed the March 31st issue of OK! magazine off the rack at my gym this morning to keep me company as I ran on the treadmill, and I nearly fell off from laughing. Ugly Betty star, Vanessa Williams, admits to having almost smeared urine all over her face in an effort to get rid of acne.

Oh my! Acne is stressful and embarrassing I'm sure, but I think my face would have to be falling off before I considered doing that! Apparently, someone told her that urine cures acne and she almost followed through with it. Her confession suggests she put her valuable "morning urine" in a container, but just couldn't follow through with applying it.

There's a couple of things you can pretty much count on when it comes to asparagus:

1) It will supply you with a variety of powerful antioxidants, including a healthy dose of glutathione;

2) It contains a good amount of folate, which has been shown reduce the risk of heart disease and certain types of cancer;

3) It contains certain amino acids that can help reduce water retention, something that can make you look a bit puffy, and;

4) It will make the pee of many people who eat it smell pretty funky.

Since it's the most fun topic out of the four, that's what I'll address. The pee issue.

Strangely, this scent-chaing affect that asparagus has on urine does not occur in all people. Even more strange is the fact that there is also a segment of the population who cannot smell the funky scent given off by asparagus-laced urine. It is believed that only those with a certain gene can cause the break down of chemicals inside the asparagus that causes the scent, and only those with the proper gene can smell the results of that chemical breakdown.

Does it ever seem like on those nights you're stuck lying awake you're also getting up to use the bathroom more often? Well it's not your imagination, and we have Danish researchers to thank for understanding the science behind why. They recently did a study looking at men and women and how much urine their bodies produced while sleeping overnight versus while kept awake overnight, and they found that although both sexes made more urine while awake the effect was much more pronounced in men.

Lucky you. A very random bit of information, but we all need those sometimes, right?

A famously painful affliction and butt of many jokes: the kidney stone. Common as it may be to laugh about it on a sitcom, actually having one yourself is anything but funny.

A kidney stone is just a mass of crystals that have separated from the liquid in your urinary tract. Doctors are unsure why some people seem more prone to develop them than others, but it is known that once you have one it's likely you'll develop another.

So how to prevent the whole uncomfortable scenario? Drink lots of water every day, and eat a diet rich in calcium. This doesn't mean take calcium supplements, as for some reason they actually seem to have the opposite effect. And talk with your doctor about specifics like how acidic your urine is and what specifics he may be able to narrow it down to for you personally as far as kidney stone formation causes.