Eating broccoli and cabbage lowers inflammation: Research

Scientists found, that women, who eat the most cruciferous vegetables has substantially less inflammation than those who eat the fewest.

Cruciferous vegetables include cabbage, broccoli, bok choy, Brussels sprouts, kale and cauliflower, and eating them is often encouraged as a way to lower risk for heart disease and cancer, reports Newsmax Health.

Dr. Gong Yang is a researcher at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tennessee, and senior author of the study.

"Chronic inflammation is implicated in the pathogenesis of cardiovascular and other chronic diseases - we therefore examined whether cruciferous vegetable intake may relate to inflammation," he said.

In animal studies, high intake of cruciferous vegetables has been found to lower inflammation, Yang's team writes in the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics.

To see whether that is the case in people too, Yang and colleagues analyzed signs of inflammation in the blood of 1,005 middle-aged Chinese women who filled out questionnaires about their diets as part of the Shanghai Women's Health Study.

The participants included in the new analysis were generally healthy, and had an average age of 58. Yang and his colleagues divided the women into five groups based on their daily intake of cruciferous vegetables.

The researchers then measured levels of signaling molecules involved in causing inflammation in the women's blood. Blood levels of three important inflammatory molecules - tumor necrosis factor-alpha (TNF-a), interleukin-1beta (IL-1b) and interleukin-6 (IL-6) were lowest among women with the highest intakes of cruciferous vegetables.

Dr. Neil Barnard, president of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine and an adjunct assistant professor of medicine at George Washington University, in the District of Columbia, added that cruciferous vegetables are good in other ways beyond reducing inflammation.

"They happen to be a source of a highly available calcium and provide a little protein."

He also suggests eating more than one serving of vegetables at a meal. "And a really great combination is green and orange, so you might have broccoli and sweet potato or you could have Brussels sprouts with carrots or cauliflower with carrots, something like that, so that you're mixing the colors."

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