Eating cauliflower & broccoli prevents aggressive prostate cancer….

Today's post: Tuesday, 8-14-2007

I recently read this health news item:

The U.S. National Cancer Institute, apparently working with the Cancer Care Ontario in Toronto, studied the diets of 1,300 men.

The researchers found these two very positive results.:

Eating cauliflower once a week cut the incidence of aggressive prostate cancer by 52 %.

And, eating broccoli once a week cut the incidence of aggressive prostate cancer by 47 %.

This is extremely good news for two reasons.

1. With many nutrients, you have to take them daily to get much effect. So, for something you eat once a week to roughly cut your risk in half of something really painful & deadly is incredibly good news.

And, although eating cruciferous vegetables every day may well work better, even eating one of these two each week will give you outstanding protection from aggressive prostate cancer, according to this study.

2. Many people find it a LOT easier to eat cauliflower than broccoli. And, eating cauliflower works a bit better for preventing aggressive prostate cancer than eating broccoli does.

Eating broccoli is well known to make getting most cancers a lot less likely. But many people simply don’t like it or find that broccoli simply has too harsh a taste.

Cauliflower, by, contrast is very bland to almost tasteless. And, I’ve wondered if the harsh taste of broccoli was a necessary part of the cancer protection.

This study suggests that for aggressive prostate cancer at least, the reverse may be slightly true. (My guess is that cauliflower is a bit higher in some factor than broccoli.)

This protection from aggressive prostate cancer, of course, is added an added value of these two vegetables:

Eating cruciferous vegetables of all kinds tends to prevent most cancers.

And, all cruciferous vegetables are nonstarchy vegetables -- which work very well to keep you from getting fat if you eat lots of them daily.

I’d love to see the data from a study that had men eat these two foods daily to see if that gave better protection.

My guess is that it would.

It’s also worth noting that the supplement DIM, a compound in cruciferous vegetables, has been found to reduce the breakdown of testosterone to DHT which causes BPH, or noncancerous prostate enlargement.

This compound might also be one of the ones that produces this protection against aggressive prostate cancer.

But the cruciferous vegetables have so many other compounds that make cancer less likely, you clearly would be well advised to only take DIM in addition to eating these two cruciferous vegetables.