Broccoli Kills Cancer!!
By Chuck Sudo in Food on Jul 12, 2005 2:19PM
Well, that was the basis for a George Carlin monologue some time ago. We've also read for years about the benefits of drinking a glass of wine a day, as if a heady syrah was the equivalent of an apple. Which, legend serves, also keeps the doctor away. Open a newspaper and odds are that you'll come across an article touting the benefits of ingesting everything from milk to raw foods to tea and even the occasional beer in the promise of a long life.
We write this with our tongue firmly planted in our considerably fleshy cheek. Researchers at University of Illinois at Chicago's College of Pharmacy are mapping the biochemical mechanism by which functional foods actually fight cancer. Their findings, which are published this week in the Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, center on two key proteins, Keap1 and Nrf2, which jump-start the defense against cancer when disease-preventing foods are ingested.
Keap1, which is the senior protein, detects the presence of dietary compounds like sulforaphane (the active cancer fighting compound found in broccoli) or reservatrol (found in wines) when they link with its cysteine residues, one of the amino acids that make up proteins. Keap1 binds to Nrf2, the messenger that turns on the genes for the protective proteins, averting DNA damage.
According to Andrew Mesecar, an associate professor of pharmaceutical biotechnology at UIC's College of Pharmacy, studies in mice "suggested that natural cancer-preventing compounds worked by severing the tie between Keap1 and Nrf2, freeing Nrf2 to take action, but the signaling doesn't happen this way in humans."
The UIC researchers found that the connection between the two proteins is not broken in humans. Instead, they found modification of specific cysteines in Keap1, with a particular cysteine being most likely to be altered during interaction with cancer-preventing compounds. This finding corresponded with prior results from other researchers.
As a result of the studies, scientists are proposing that the alteration of just this one amino acid in Keap1 is the critical step that spurs higher levels of the messenger Nrf2 and subsequent increased production of the protective proteins. Professor Mesecar said that as a result of the research Keap1 is now a promising new target for drugs to fight multiple types of cancer.
So go ahead and have that one glass of wine and eat your broccoli. But please do it in moderation. Chicagoist doesn't want you trading in your cancer-free living for cihrrosis and morbid obesity.