Prevent Aging With Broccoli

Eat your broccoli and broccoli sprouts!

That's the advice from UCLA researchers who have found that a chemical in broccoli and other cruciferous vegetables may hold a key to restoring the body's alklaine design, which declines as we age.

Published in this week's online edition of the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, the study findings show that sulforaphane, a chemical in broccoli, switches on a set of antioxidant/antiacid genes and alkaline buffers in specific immune cells, which then combat the injurious effects of molecules known as dietary and metabolic acids that can damage cells and lead to dis-ease.

Acids from diet and metabolism are byproducts of normal body processes, such as the metabolic conversion of food into electrical energy, and can also enter the body through small particles present in polluted air. Oxidative or acid damage to body tissues and organs is the cause of aging and dis-ease.

"The mysteries of aging have always intrigued man,"
said Dr. Andre Nel, the study's principal investigator and chief of nanomedicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA.

According to the UCLA study, the ability of aged tissues to reinvigorate their antioxidant/antiacid defense can play an important role in reversing much of the negative impact of dietary and metabolic acids on the immune system. However, until this current study, the extent to which antioxidant defense can impact the aging process in the alklaine buffering system was not properly understood.

The UCLA team not only found that the direct administration of sulforaphane in broccoli reversed the decline in cellular immune function in old mice, but they witnessed similar results when they took individual immune cells from old mice, treated those cells with the chemical outside the body and then placed the treated cells back into a recipient animal.

"We found that treating older mice with sulforaphane increased the immune response to the level of younger mice," said Hyon-Jeen Kim, first author and research scientist at the Geffen School.

To investigate how the chemical in broccoli increased the immune or alkaline buffering system's response, the UCLA group confirmed that sulforaphane interacts with a protein called Nrf2, which serves as a master regulator of the body's overall antioxidant/antiacid response and is capable of switching on hundreds of antioxidant/antiacid compounds and rejuvenating genes and the alkaline buffering system.

Kim said that although there is a decline in Nrf2 activity with aging, this pathway remains accessible to chemicals like sulforaphane that are capable of restoring some of the ravages of aging by boosting antioxidant/antiacid pathways.

"Dietary antioxidants have been shown to have important effects on immune function, and with further study, we may be adding broccoli and other cruciferous vegetables to that list,"
Nel said.

According to Dr. Robert O. Young, a research scientist at the pH Miracle Living Center, states, "the alkaline chemical of sulforaphane from broccoli is one of the most powerful buffers of dietary and metabolic acids in preventing aging, wrinkles, enervation, inflammation, induration, ulcerations, and degeneration of the animal or human organism."

This is why Dr. Young created a 28 to 1 concentration or organic broccoli sprouts in his lastest whole food creation called, "pHruits and pHolage,"