Yes, our old friend Sulforaphane is back in the news again, this time in a paper trying to understand how it kills prostate cancer cells.
According to the paper published in the journal Oncogensis, it has already been shown that sulforaphane can kill prostate cancer cells while leaving normal cells intact (or more accurately can make the cells kills themselves in a process known as programmed cell death). It can also reduce incidences of metastasis (when the cancer spreads) in GM mouse models and has been shown in rodent models to not be toxic at the pharmaceutical levels used in these experiments.
The rest of the paper is pretty heavy reading but the gist is that they have identified that when one of our enzymes is deactivated or destabilised it increases the effect of the treatment with Sulforaphane.
Although this is not something that can be achieved by the amount you would get from eating cruciferous vegetables it is still worth to eat them as sulforaphane can induce detoxification enzymes that expel air pollutants from our body, as mentioned in one of our previous blogs.
Another reason to eat them is that they actually taste pretty good.
Click here to read the article on the Nature website