Eli5: Why do some colored foods (e.g. beets) turn urine pink/red while other colored foods (e.g. blueberries) do not?
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Beets contain betanin, which is vividly red colored and which some people cannot break down effectively during digestion, so it’s … excreted.
Most things in food are effectively broken down into pieces to be used as vitamins, nutrients, calories, etc during digestion.
But some things we just cannot break down. Eat a lot of chewing gum, and you’ll see it in your poop. We can’t break that down, naturally. There are chemicals in food that we can’t digest, and betanin is one of them.
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