Broccoli, Again

Readers of health websites must be really fed up with the abundant info about broccoli. Maybe they’d prefer to hear about kale? I don’t think so . . .

The latest research results concern broccoli and the immune system. The findings are especially important for older people. UCLA scientists reported in the Journal of Allergy and Immunology on the role of a chemical contained in broccoli, sulforaphane. This substance stimulates antioxidant responses in specific immune cells, which then attack harmful free radicals that damage cells and cause diseases.

Free radicals are byproducts of normal metabolic processes, and can also be absorbed into the body through the airways. Oxidative damage of this sort is thought to be one of the major causes of aging. It’s postulated that the aging body has an imbalance, in which the formation of free radicals is greater than their removal by antioxidant mechanisms.

The researchers found that direct administration of sulforaphane reverses the age-related decline in immune function in old mice. In a further step, they treated immune cells (especially dendritic cells) removed from the body of old mice with sulforaphane, and returned them to the body; cellular immunity was restored.

Sulforaphane may be better than most antioxidants. It interacts with a protein called Nrf2 that is a master regulator of the body’s overall response to antioxidants.

We can mock this study as being only in mice. However, there are plenty of human studies showing the health benefits of broccoli. So maybe we should take seriously the benefits shown by sulforaphane in ‘rejuvenating’ the antioxidant responses in immune cells in older members of the animal kingdom; mice long-ago proved to be fairly reliable models of immune responses in humans. So, eat your broccoli, if you’re not so young as you used to be!