Broccoli is sometimes called the king of vegetables, you won’t find them much healthier. New research now shows that that name may be justified. Broccoli turns out to be extremely good for the intestinal wall.
Broccoli is of course not the only healthy vegetable, a varied portion ‘with all colours’, as the Netherlands Nutrition Center describes it, remains important. But it has been shown time and time again that cruciferous vegetables such as broccoli, Brussels sprouts, kale, kohlrabi, radish, bok choy, rutabaga, watercress, Chinese and white cabbage are particularly good for life and limb. If you eat a lot of these vegetables, the risk of all kinds of cancer and type 2 diabetes would decrease. But the exact reasons behind these impressive features are not fully known.
Why broccoli?
An important puzzle piece is now provided by a new study, showing that broccoli contains certain molecules, which bind to a specific receptor in lab mice. The result is that the inside of the small intestine wall is protected. As a result, diseases are less likely to develop. From this study you could conclude that broccoli is actually a superfood, as is often said.
“We’ve been told all our lives that broccoli is good for us, but why is this? What happens in the human body when we eat broccoli?” ask biologists of the Penn State University wonders. The scientists themselves have found the answer to this: “We have discovered an important mechanism that greatly improves the health of mice, and probably humans as well. We found strong evidence that broccoli and other cruciferous vegetables, such as cabbage and Brussels sprouts, should be part of a normal healthy diet.”
The wall of the small intestine
The researchers explain that the wall of the small intestine allows water and nutrients to flow from the digestive system to the rest of the body, while blocking other food particles and harmful bacteria. There are three types of cells lining the intestinal wall that regulate these processes and maintain a healthy balance: the enterocytes, which absorb water and nutrients, the goblet cells, which produce a protective mucus layer, and the Paneth cells, which secrete lysosomes containing digestive enzymes and have the task of protecting the body against bacteria from the intestinal tract.
Lots of broccoli
The team found that certain molecules from broccoli, called aryl hydrocarbon receptor ligands, bind to the aryl carbohydrate receptors (AHR) in the body. These are proteins that bind to specific DNA sequences and are called ‘transcription factors’. The research shows that these bonds initiate a whole series of molecular actions that influence the function of the intestinal cells above. The scientists came to this conclusion after putting a group of lab mice on a diet of 15 percent broccoli. A control group was fed a normal lab diet without broccoli. They then analyzed the animal tissue to determine to what extent the AHR was activated, how many of the different cell types were present in the intestinal wall, and how high the mucus concentration was in both test groups.
Higher AHR activity
The AHR activity was clearly lower in the mice that had not eaten broccoli. This resulted in a clear change in intestinal wall function. The food passed faster through the small intestine. The team counted fewer goblet cells. The mucus layer was also thinner, there were fewer Paneth cells, the lysosome production was lower and there were fewer enterocytes present in the walls of the mouse intestines.
“The gut health of the mice that didn’t eat broccoli had deteriorated in all sorts of ways. The data clearly show that a diet without broccoli increases the risk of disease,” says one of the researchers. “We show that broccoli and probably other cruciferous vegetables are a natural source of AHR ligands. A diet rich in these substances contributes to healthy and resilient small intestines and good health in general.”
