New ways to get extra cancer protection from cruciferous vegetables....

Today's Post: Tuesday, 8-13-2013

Raw cruciferous vegetables such as raw broccoli florets and raw cauliflower florets and kale or water cress in salads and the diced cabbage in coleslaw are all unusually effective cancer preventers.  Men who eat raw broccoli florets and raw cauliflower florets have cut their chances of getting the aggressive form of prostate cancer in half for example.

But I just learned two other ways to get extra cancer protection from cruciferous vegetables.

1.    It may well work as well or better for lightly steamed broccoli or cauliflower.  It seems that doing so helps release an anticancer ingredient, myrosinase.

2.  BUT frozen and more fully cooked broccoli or cauliflower tend to lose some of this cancer protective ability.   (The processors flash heat frozen vegetables a lot just before they freeze it)

However, if you eat frozen or cooked broccoli or cauliflower, or other cruciferous vegetable it may restore its ability to prevent cancer and add more.

It seems if you add even a little of another raw cruciferous vegetable to the cooked or heated frozen broccoli or cauliflower, or other cruciferous vegetable not only do you get its cancer protection, it interacts with what the cooked or frozen one has left to partially or fully restore its cancer preventive qualities too.

That means you can add a raw cruciferous vegetable and even get creative with it such as diced Daikon radish or even mustard to cooked broccoli or cauliflower to restore the anticancer effect!

The raw one has some cancer prevention by itself AND it may link with the remaining phytonutrient in the cooked or frozen broccoli to even restore the anticancer effect there too!

Here’s the Medical News Today story I saw on that:

Scientists put cancer-fighting power back into frozen broccoli

http://mnt.to/a/4gb4

There was bad news, then good news from University of Illinois broccoli 

researchers this month. In the first study, they learned that frozen broccoli 

lacks the ability to form sulforaphane, the cancer-fighting phytochemical in 

fresh broccoli.

They say that “consumers can spice up their frozen, cooked broccoli with another food that contains myrosinase to bring the frozen cancer-fighting super-food up to nutritional speed.”

"Try teaming frozen broccoli with raw radishes, cabbage, arugula, watercress, horseradish, spicy mustard, or wasabi to give those bioactive compounds a boost," one woman expert advised.