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Asparagus
Nutritional Profile
Energy value (calories per serving): Low
Protein: High
Fat: Low
Saturated fat: Low
Cholesterol: None
Carbohydrates: Moderate
Fiber: Moderate
Sodium: Low
Major vitamin contribution: Vitamin A, folate, vitamin C
Major mineral contribution: Potassium, iron

About the Nutrients in This Food

Asparagus has some dietary fiber, vitamin A, and vitamin C. It is an excellent source of the B vitamin folate.
A serving of four cooked asparagus spears ( inch wide at the base)
has 1.2 g dietary fiber, 604 IU vitamin A (26 percent of the RDA for a
woman, 20 percent of the RDA for a man), 4.5 mg vitamin C (6 percent of
the RDA for a woman, 5 percent of the RDA for a man), and 89 mcg folate
(22 percent of the RDA).

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The Most Nutritious Way to Serve This Food

Fresh, boiled and drained. Canned asparagus may have less than half the
nutrients found in freshly cooked spears.

Diets That May Restrict or Exclude This Food

Low-sodium diet (canned asparagus)

Buying This Food

Look for: Bright green stalks. The tips should be purplish and tightly
closed; the stalks should be firm. Asparagus is in season from March
through August.
Avoid: Wilted stalks and asparagus whose buds have opened.

Storing This Food

Store fresh asparagus in the refrigerator. To keep it as crisp as possible, wrap it in a damp
paper towel and then put the whole package into a plastic bag. Keeping asparagus cool helps
it hold onto its vitamins. At 32F, asparagus will retain all its folic acid for at least two weeks
and nearly 80 percent of its vitamin C for up to five days; at room temperature, it would lose
up to 75 percent of its folic acid in three days and 50 percent of the vitamin C in 24 hours.

Preparing This Food

The white part of the fresh green asparagus stalk is woody and tasteless, so you can bend
the stalk and snap it right at the line where the green begins to turn white. If the skin is very
thick, peel it, but save the parings for soup stock.

What Happens When You Cook This Food

Chlorophyll, the pigment that makes green vegetables green, is sensitive to acids. When
you heat asparagus, its chlorophyll will react chemically with acids in the asparagus or in
the cooking water to form pheophytin, which is brown. As a result, cooked asparagus is
olive-drab.
You can prevent this chemical reaction by cooking the asparagus so quickly that there
is no time for the chlorophyll to react with acids, or by cooking it in lots of water (which
will dilute the acids), or by leaving the lid off the pot so that the volatile acids can float off
into the air.
Cooking also changes the texture of asparagus: water escapes from its cells and they
collapse. Adding salt to the cooking liquid slows the loss of moisture.

How Other Kinds of Processing Affect This Food

Canning. The intense heat of canning makes asparagus soft, robs it of its bright green
color, and reduces the vitamin A, B, and C content by at least half. (White asparagus,
which is bleached to remove the green color, contains about 5 percent of the vitamin A
in fresh asparagus.) With its liquid, canned asparagus, green or white, contains about 90
times the sodium in fresh asparagus (348 mg in 3.5 oz. canned against 4 mg in 3.5 oz. fresh
boiled asparagus).

Medical Uses and/or Benefits

Lower risk of some birth defects. As many as two of every 1,000 babies born in the United
States each year may have cleft palate or a neural tube (spinal cord) defect due to their mothers not having gotten adequate amounts of folate during pregnancy. The RDA for folate is

Asparagus
400 mcg for healthy adult men and women, 600 mcg for pregnant women, and 500 mcg for
women who are nursing. Taking folate supplements before becoming pregnant and through
the first two months of pregnancy reduces the risk of cleft palate; taking folate through the
entire pregnancy reduces the risk of neural tube defects.
Lower risk of heart attack. In the spring of 1998, an analysis of data from the records for more
than 80,000 women enrolled in the long-running Nurses Health Study at Harvard School of
Public Health/Brigham and Womans Hospital, in Boston, demonstrated that a diet providing
more than 400 mcg folate and 3 mg vitamin B6 daily, from either food or supplements, more
than twice the current RDA for each, may reduce a womans risk of heart attack by almost 50
percent. Although men were not included in the analysis, the results are assumed to apply to
them as well.
However, data from a meta-analysis published in the Journal of the American Medical
Association in December 2006 called this theory into question. Researchers at Tulane University examined the results of 12 controlled studies in which 16,958 patients with preexisting
cardiovascular disease were given either folic acid supplements or placebos (look-alike pills
with no folic acid) for at least six months. The scientists, who found no reduction in the risk
of further heart disease or overall death rates among those taking folic acid, concluded that
further studies will be required to verify whether taking folic acid supplements reduces the
risk of cardiovascular disease.

Adverse Effects Associated with This Food

Odorous urine. After eating asparagus, we all excrete the sulfur compound methyl mercaptan, a smelly waste product, in our urine.

Food/Drug Interactions
Anticoagulants. Asparagus is high in vitamin K, a vitamin manufactured naturally by bacteria in our intestines, an adequate supply of which enables blood to clot normally. Eating
foods that contain this vitamin may interfere with the effectiveness of anticoagulants such
as heparin and warfarin (Coumadin, Dicumarol, Panwarfin) whose job is to thin blood and
dissolve clots.