Health Impact News
by Paul Fassa
Health Impact News
It’s well known among health conscious consumers and holistic health practitioners that broccoli and other related cruciferous vegetables such as cauliflower, cabbage, garden cress, bok choy, and brussels sprouts offer antioxidant protection against developing cancer.
Micro-nutrients that protect against cancer, known as isothiocyanates, are high in broccoli. The most powerful isothiocyanate tumor stifling ingredient recently isolated from broccoli is known as sulforaphane. But the amount of broccoli needed to protect against cancer is beyond the comfort zone of most modern folks.
And the fact that so few are raw vegans puts broccoli into various types of cookware. Cooking destroys many enzymes in veggies that are needed to metabolize whatever macro and micro nutrients are available with raw vegetables.
However a powerful solution exists with broccoli sprouts. The sprouts are more nutrient dense and contain up to 50 times or more of the amount of sulforaphane than normal broccoli.
More importantly, sprouts are eaten raw with other foods, which keeps their vital enzymes intact. [1]
Sandwiches of all types, scrambled eggs, soups, and salads are enjoyed even more by adding crunchy broccoli sprouts, which are as tasty as popular alfalfa sprouts. It doesn’t get any easier or tastier than that to increase one’s cancer fighting food intake.
The Research and Legal Saga of Broccoli Sprouts
Perhaps the most profoundly famous and notoriously infamous study was conducted by researchers at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. It was profound because they isolated previously unknown powerful anti-cancer properties of broccoli sprouts.
It was notoriously infamous because they tried to patent broccoli sprout seeds for monetary gain. The problem was they didn’t genetically modify the seed or even create a hybrid.
After the Johns Hopkins broccoli sprout studies, which had started around 1992, one of the researchers, Dr. Paul Talalay, formed the corporation Brassica Protection Products (BPP) to “…exploit the financial benefits of my findings.” [2]
