Broccoli's Remarkable Power

This chunky, floret-headed brassica
is packed with antioxidants and vitamins,
rich in calcium and brain-stimulating
boron, and can even help to regulate
oestrogen levels

By Connie Phillipson
Athens News

Thus, for example, it is generally believed that broccoli is a forerunner of cauliflower. Yet broccoli appears to have trailed cauliflower in culinary usage by about a century or so, perhaps because it has a much more pungent taste and smell.

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The Italians lay claim to priority when it comes to broccoli (B oleracea, var italica), and etymologically at least this appears justified. The name comes from the Italian word brocco, meaning "shoot" or "sprout", from the Latin bracchium, an arm or a branch, and ultimately from the Homeric Greek brachion, an arm. Certamly, a concise description of the plant with its numerous thick and fleshy stalks. Like most other members of the cabbage family, broccoli seems to have been earlier eaten for its stalks, while the eating of the flowering heads appears to have been a later development.

Broccoli seems to have been ushered into French society and cuisine by Catherine de Medici when she married Henry II in 1533. But for a long time the term "brocoli" (the French spell it with one 'C') has been used to refer to the cabbage stalk, and is still so used in some places today. Broccoli was apparently introduced into England around 1720, but somehow the word came to refer to cauliflower. It appears to have been brought to the New World not long after that date, but the vegetable was not generally grown and sold in the United States until the middle of the 20th century. It took the whole of World War II and the American GIs returning from Europe, where they had been exposed to broccoli and its preparations, to create the necessary demand, appropriate market conditions and, of course, the opportune marketing policy.

As it happens, broccoli is one of the few European vegetables adopted by the Chinese, who have surpassed even the Italians in the art of cooking it. The usual broccoli served in European restaurant as one of the two veggies, is a sorrowful squishy mush, sometimes saved by the sauce poured over it. By contrast the Chinese, and the Italians very frequently, prepare a crisp crunchy vegetable, full of flavour, that Surprises the tongue with its tart but enjoyable taste

A measure of its success is that broccoli has become one of the most important frozen foods in the world. This is just as well, since the vegetable is virtually a storehouse of vitamins and minerals, especially vitamins A and C, and like all other cruciferous vegetables, is a food that fights against chronic degenerative diseases.

Thus broccoli and its siblings are high in calcium and good substitutes for cow's milk, to which one in two grown-up inhabitants of the Mediterranean Basin have a pronounced intolerance. The vegetable contains a good deal of boron, a trace element that is of the utmost importance in the absorption of calcium, but not only. Boron is also an enhancer of the electrical -activity of the brain. Experiments conducted at the Grand Forks Human Nutrition Research Center in the US, showed that a lack of boron produced more theta waves and fewer alpha waves in the brain, typical of a drowsy condition. The reverse was the case when the amount of, boron increased. The lack of boron appeared to downshift the brain to a lower level of activity.

Broccoli and the other members of the cabbage family also possess what has, been called "oestrogenic activity". That is to say, they are in a position to help regulate the important female hormones known under the general name of oestrogen. What is very important to notice is that such vegetables have the capacity to both increase and dedrease the amount of oestrogen available in the cells according to need, something that approaches beneficial magic in its effects. Increasing estrogen is particularly important with menopausal or post-menopausal women, when the stores of oestrogen in the ovaries gradually dry up. Eating foods with oestrogenic activity (wheat bran, cruciferous vegetables such as broccoli, legumes,etc.) is a lot better than hormone replacement therapy, and has none of the latters deadly risks.

Decreasing oestrogen on the other hand is useful in cases of breast cancer. Here cruciferous vegetables help lower the fibrocystic lumps in the breast, by speeding up metabolic activity and eliminating the extra oestrogen that aggravates the condition.

They are packed with antioxidants, including beta carotene, glucarate, glutathione, indoles, lutein, quercetin, sulforaphane, and others. Because processing and cooking tends to destroy some of the antioxidants, such as glutathione and the indoles, eat them preferably raw or lightly cooked as the Chinese do in their stir-fry woks.

What should be added as a warning is that broccoli and other cruciferous vegetables should be avoided by patients with Crohn's disease, becaqse they tend to induce the known symptom of discomfort. Equally, these vegetables tend to produce gas in the consumer's intestine, and further increase the discomfort.

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