Effects of broccoli on stomach infections and tumors

Like Bush the Elder

I like broccoli. But broccoli doesn’t like me. When I eat it, I develop a migraine headache that can hang on for a full day or more. So unfortunately the benefits – and the pleasures – of broccoli are beyond me.

But I’ve just finished reading about a new study, and while it may not do me any good, it revealed how increasing your consumption of this leafy green may help you cut down on your prescription drug use.

A new study out of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine looked at the effects of broccoli on stomach infections and tumors. Among the conclusions, researchers reported that broccoli contains a compound that, under certain conditions, can outperform antibiotics.

The researchers set out to examine sulforaphane, a substance that the body creates out of a compound called glucoraphanin, that is commonly found in broccoli — and to a lesser degree in other cruciferous vegetables such as cauliflower and Brussels sprouts.

The study was divided into two parts. The first part was a laboratory study in which sulforaphane was tested against Helicobacter pylori, a bacterium that causes peptic ulcers and several different kinds of cancer including stomach cancer. H. pylori is extremely difficult to treat. Antibiotics are somewhat effective against it, but H. pylori microbes defend themselves by burrowing into the cells of the stomach lining where they are protected from antibiotics. In test tube trials, the researchers showed that sulforaphane was more effective than antibiotics in killing H. pylori — even able to kill the H. pylori that had burrowed into the stomach lining cells.

The second part of the study was conducted with mice dosed with a chemical known to cause stomach cancer. Mice that were treated with sulforaphane suffered 39 percent fewer stomach tumors than the mice that were not treated. These results are significant because they are among the first to identify a particular chemical that could account for the fact that people who eat more vegetables are less likely to develop cancer.

In the early ’90s when the researchers first uncovered the process by which glucoraphanin creates sulforaphane, they also discovered that glucoraphanin is more than 20 times more concentrated in three-day-old broccoli sprouts than it is in broccoli. In other words, it would take a full pound and a quarter of cooked broccoli to equal the glucoraphanin contained in a single ounce of broccoli sprouts.

So you don’t have to eat a wheelbarrow filled with broccoli each day to reap the benefits of glucoraphanin.

Encouraged by the results of their recent studies, the Hopkins researchers will go to Japan, where they are facing current epidemics of stomach cancer and peptic ulcers, to test the effectiveness of the broccoli sprouts in humans infected with H. pylori. It’s believed that as many as 80 percent of Japanese adults are afflicted with the bacteria. The findings of this study could eventually be of vital importance to developing countries where antibiotics and other medical treatments are often impossible to come by.