Using Modern Science To Discover Nature’s Most Efficient Cancer-Fighting Foods
CHURCHVILLE, Va.–Is natural food better for us than the modern high- tech stuff? Lots of folks believe this is true, to judge from the labels in my supermarket.
Never mind that natural fungal toxins have always infested unprotected crops and that there is a history of human deaths from such natural food- borne infections as botulism. (Home-canned green beans and uncured meat were famous sources of botulism. The symptoms included double-vision, violent nausea and suffocation due to respiratory paralysis.)
There is also the reality that natural foods are highly variable even within the same specie. Researchers recently tested 75 varieties of broccoli to see how much each contained of a newly discovered cancer- fighting chemical called glucoraphanin. They found 30-fold differences among the varieties!
We’ve only recently discovered that glucoraphanin (and its breakdown product, sulforaphane) stimulate enzymes that cleanse our cells. As people get older, their cells tend to get clogged with the debris from living and breathing.
Cleaner cells mean less risk of cancer. Eating glucoraphanin (found in broccoli) means cleaner cells and lower long-term risk of cancer.
However, researchers at the Vegetable Laboratory of the Department of Agriculture found that some varieties of broccoli have lots of the cancer- fighting compound and some have hardly any.
Apparently, it’s not a very important natural selection factor for broccoli in the wild. Since we’ve only known about glucoraphanin for a few years, no one has been breeding broccoli for high levels of the compound. In fact, it’s only the advent of such laboratory tools as the high- performance liquid chromatograph that have allowed us to find and measure it.
It’s only since we’ve been able to monitor the ability of these compounds to detoxify living mammalian cells that we’ve known its importance.
Mark Farnham, the USDA researcher who tested the broccoli varieties for glucoraphanin, says other scientific specialists are now checking to find out how much of the compound is good for us, and how much might be too much.
There’s already a brand of patented broccoli sprouts on the market that’s guaranteed to provide a high level of glucoraphanin. At least one company is trying to extract the glucoraphanin to be marketed in capsules.
Testing indicates people get more protection from eating the foods themselves than from eating the extracted chemicals in pills. Farnham doubts most people want to swallow pills or munch sprouts rather than eat the broccoli itself. He does want to produce broccoli that will consistently give consumers high levels of the glucoraphanin.
I happen to like broccoli. I was eating it several times a week even before I knew it had cancer-fighting capabilities.
But think how awful it would be for some poor soul like former President George Herbert Walker Bush, who hated broccoli, to choke it down for health reasons and then find out he was swallowing the wrong variety!
Farnham says the tendency for broccoli plants to produce glucoraphanin is significantly inheritable. He hopes we can breed broccoli varieties with optimal levels of the health-enhancing chemical within 10 years, though there’s no guarantee. There might even be a biotech strategy that would bring high-glucoraphanin broccoli to our tables sooner.
All of this may sound complicated and expensive, but it’s certainly safer and more productive than the “natural” testing primitive man did for thousands of years.
Some unknown volunteer back in prehistory ate the first tomato. That venturesome or desperate person picked that unknown vegetable off the vine, chewed it and swallowed it.
More to the point, someone also chewed and swallowed the tomato’s deadly relative, nightshade. The tribe then held an appropriate funeral (serving tomato salsa at the dinner?) and started a legend instructing kids not to eat nightshade.
But how would the tribe have been able to discern the cancer-fighting benefits of broccoli? Especially since most of them were dead by age 30– “natural” diets notwithstanding.
Even when we started living longer, who would have guessed it was partly due to a few ounces of glucoraphanin in our broccoli?
No wonder we’ve just discovered anti-oxidants and mammalian detoxification enzymes, and the fabulously ascending power of science to raise our lives above what hominoids eons ago thought was “natural.”
DENNIS T. AVERY is based in Churchville, Va., and is director of global food issues for the Hudson Institute of Indianapolis. His views are not necessarily those of BridgeNews, whose ventures include the Internet site www.bridge.com.
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Dennis T. Avery is based in Churchville, Va., and is director of global food issues for the Hudson Institute of Indianapolis.
