Broccoli every day may keep cancer away, study says
Your mother may have been on to something all those years she forced you to eat Brussels sprouts. The vegetable that people love to hate, as well as broccoli, cabbage and soy beans, forms the basis for a new kind of diet that may actually prevent cancer and other age-related diseases by having a strong effect on how your genes behave.
Research out of the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) serves as the foundation for the “epigenetic diet.” Experts believe this diet can ward off illness by suppressing changes in how genes can cause disease.
Environmental factors, such as what food we eat, are known to affect the epigenome, the cellular material outside the genome that dictates how genes behave. While it cannot change a person’s DNA, the epigenome can cause genes to behave in different ways.
A genome is an organism’s complete set of DNA, including all of its genes. Each genome contains all of the information needed to build and maintain that organism. In humans, a copy of the entire genome—more than 3 billion DNA base pairs—is contained in all cells that have a nucleus.
Now, researchers at the UAB have discovered that compounds in certain foods can prevent cancer and other diseases by suppressing those changes that lead to illness.
Isn’t this what our Mother has told us since we started eating whole foods – “eat your greens – they are good for you“, “an apple a day keeps the doctor away”, etc, etc.
“Your mother always told you to eat your vegetables, and she was right,” said study co-author Trygve Tollefsbol, a biology professor at the UAB. “But now we better understand why she was right — compounds in many of these foods suppress gene behaviours that over time cause fatal diseases.”
For their study, researchers first identified disease-fighting compounds in vegetables in their lab at the UAB’s biology department.
They then compiled international studies on dietary compounds that fight disease and compared them with their own research. The results overwhelmingly showed “that many of the dietary compounds that we consume have epigenetic effects that can prevent cancer,” Tollefsbol said.
The findings were published in the journal Clinical Epigenetics.
The research led the UAB team to coin the term “epigenetic diet,” which includes foods known to inhibit those unwanted gene behaviours. In addition to broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cabbage and soy beans, the diet includes:
- fava beans
- green tea
Researchers say the diet can be easily adopted because the foods don’t have to be consumed in unreasonable quantities for their compounds to be effective. For example, three cups of green tea per day provides enough polyphenols, which research in mice has shown suppresses the gene that triggers breast cancer. One cup of broccoli per day also provides enough sulforaphane, which studies show reduces the risk of many types of cancer.
You can improve the effectiveness of eating broccoli by sprinkling Genuine Wasabia japonica over the cooked broccoli. This is because broccoli does not contain enough of one chemical to active all its goodness, whereas Wasabia japonica has abundance.
It’s no secret that a diet high in vegetables, fruit and legumes has a massive amount of health benefits, from lower blood pressure and cholesterol to a reduced risk of infections. The epigenetics diet shows that, just as environmental factors such as pollution, smoking, or a poor diet can have a negative impact on how genes express themselves, eating certain healthy foods can have the opposite effect. We are what we eat.
“Our review article has drawn everything together from global studies,” Tollefsbol said. “And the common theme is that compounds in the epigenetics diet foods can, at the very least, help us lead healthier lives and help our bodies prevent potentially debilitating diseases like breast cancer and Alzheimer’s.”
At long last it looks like the science of today is catching up with the knowledge that has been known about in a non-scientific way fro thousands of years. Modern Medicine has been trying to suppress this knowledge for a century while promoting the use of laboratory produced products which have more problems than benefits.
Reference: Meeran, S.M., Ahmed, A. and Tollefsbol, T.O. Epigenetic targets of bioactive dietary components for cancer prevention and therapy. Clinical Epigenetics 1, 101-116, 2010.