Broccoli protects
YOU better start cultivating a taste for broccoli. Two John Hopkins University scientists say they have discovered in broccoli the presence of a chemical compound -- sulforaphane -- which helps fight cancer in animals. Paul Talalay and Gary H Posner had previously reported that sulforaphane increased the production of anti-cancer enzymes in laboratory cultures of human cells.
In their latest study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they found that sulforaphane and some other chemically related compounds that they had synthesised in the laboratory, arrested the development of breast tumours in rats.