Did you know the way to get the maximum health benefits from broccoli?
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In recent years, broccoli has gained a reputation as an excellent vegetable due to its high levels of a particularly beneficial compound called sulforaphane.
With some early-stage studies showing how this compound plays a role in blood sugar control and potentially even has anti-cancer benefits, it's no wonder that broccoli pills are on the rise.
However, a 2011 study showed that eating the whole vegetable gets you more sulforaphane than taking a supplement – so a team of Chinese researchers decided to try and find the best way to cook broccoli.
They arrived at a clear winner, publishing their results in 2018 in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry – but it's a tough sell if you have better things to do with your time.
Scientists Found a Healthier Way to Cook Broccoli, But There's a Catch
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In brief, chopping the vegetable and letting it sit for 90 minutes before cooking yields the maximum nutritional benefit.
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To kick myrosinase activity into gear, you need to do damage to the broccoli, so you'd think cooking would do the trick.
Unfortunately, studies have shown that common broccoli cooking methods, like boiling and microwaving, seriously reduce the amount of glucosinolates in the vegetable – even if you just zap it for a couple minutes. And myrosinase is super-sensitive to heat, too.
Hence, by far the largest amount of sulforaphane you can get from broccoli is by munching on raw florets. Ugh.
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This really caught my eye because I'm a fan of Dr. Georgia Ede's work. She gave me the confidence to break the lessons of a lifetime, and completely eliminate plant food. And it's done me nothing but good. Since my digestive system healed from gluten sensitivity, I'm aware of how fiber sensitive I am.
But my issues with plant foods go far beyond, into lectins and other plant sensitivities. I only eat pickled or fermented vegetables now, and fresh and raw only applies to botanical fruits. I'm frankly startled by the digestive difference that makes.
The described experiment is not just about broccoli. It's highly illustrative of the central problem with vegetables. All those nutrients that the lab detects might not be in the vegetable, or capable of being absorbed,
at all!
This is where the Weston Price Foundation has some interesting information on the labor and effort our ancestors put into making vegetables edible and storeable. From sauerkraut to yogurt, fermented is how most foods wound up being served, no? Even Italian cold cuts are fermented meat!
Ironically the author of
Death By Food Pyramid is also outspoken about the damage a raw food diet did. So being a "raw foodie" is not an option for me, certainly.
But maybe our current, corporate-fed, vegan obsession is even worse than we think? This continual undermining of the entire food chain has so many ripple effects, on both mental and physical health.
We've been coasting on assumptions about diet for far too long. How human bodies fared when they switched to agriculture is an anthropological fact. Still.
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While farmers concentrate on high-carbohydrate crops like rice and potatoes, the mix of wild plants and animals in the diets of surviving hunter-gatherers provides more protein and a bettter balance of other nutrients. In one study, the Bushmen's average daily food intake (during a month when food was plentiful) was 2,140 calories and 93 grams of protein, considerably greater than the recommended daily allowance for people of their size. It's almost inconceivable that Bushmen, who eat 75 or so wild plants, could die of starvation the way hundreds of thousands of Irish farmers and their families did during the potato famine of the 1840s.
The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race
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Scientists Found a Healthier Way to Cook Broccoli, But There's a Catch
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