How Not to Die by Michael Greger

Author:Michael Greger
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pan Macmillan

Cruciferous Supplements?

If you don’t like the taste of cruciferous vegetables but still want the benefits of the sulforaphane, what about the broccoli supplements currently on the market? Researchers recently put a leading commercial supplement to the test. BroccoMax boasts the equivalent of half a pound of broccoli in every capsule. Study subjects were given either six capsules a day or 50 grams of broccoli sprouts. The supplement hardly worked at all, whereas the sprouts boosted blood levels about eight times higher for eight times less cost. The researchers concluded that “our data provides further evidence that bioavailability of [sulforaphane] is dramatically lower when subjects consume broccoli supplements compared to fresh broccoli sprouts.”21

Too Much of a Good Thing?

If broccoli sprouts are so cheap and effective, why not eat bowls of them? A formal safety analysis found no significant adverse effects to about 75 grams a day,22 but we didn’t have data on a potential upper limit until a team of Italian researchers tried to push the envelope. They were attempting to come up with an intravenous infusion dose to use as chemotherapy, and so they wanted to know how high they could go. The researchers discovered that blood levels achieved by more than 200 grams of broccoli sprouts may indeed be detrimental.23 They concluded, however, that no harm was found at “nutritionally attainable concentrations.” But that’s not really true. Broccoli sprouts do have a radishy bite, but someone could theoretically eat 200 grams of sprouts a day. (They don’t know health nuts like I know some health nuts.)

Let me tell you a story. A few years ago, someone came up to me after a lecture in Miami and told me he had heard that wheat-grass juice was good for you. “It cleans you out,” he had read. So he thought, Why not? and decided to stuff himself with it. He told me how he calculated the volume of the human digestive tract (all ten yards or so) and proceeded to drink that amount continuously, liter after liter, until it started coming out the other end. Intrigued, I asked him what happened. He looked up at me with an expression that I can only describe as rapturous and said, “It was volcanic.”

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