A new study has found that eating broccoli at least a few times per week can offer protective benefits from liver cancer.
Since broccoli consumption has previously been linked to reducing the risk of certain cancers, including breast and prostate cancers, researchers at the University of Illinois were curious to see if there was a link between the vegetable and liver cancer and fatty liver, or nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD).
"The normal story about broccoli and health is that it can protect against a number of different cancers. But nobody had looked at liver cancer," Elizabeth Jeffery, an emeritus professor of nutrition at U of I, said in the press release. "We decided that liver cancer needed to be studied particularly because of the obesity epidemic in the U.S. It is already in the literature that obesity enhances the risk for liver cancer and this is particularly true for men. They have almost a 5-fold greater risk for liver cancer if they are obese."
The research team conducted the study in four groups of mice. The mice were either fed a control diet or a westernized diet that either included or did not include broccoli. The researchers were particularly interested in how broccoli would affect the group of mice that became obese from eating a westernized diet as opposed to becoming obese from genetics.
The team found that the group of mice eating a westernized diet had more and larger cancer nodules in the liver. When broccoli was added to the diet, the number of nodules declined. The size of the nodules, however, remained the same. The researchers also found that broccoli appeared to protect the health of the mice in the westernized diet group that had developed lipid or fat globules on the liver, which can indicate NAFLD.
"We found that the Westernized diet did increase fatty liver, but we saw that the broccoli protected against it. Broccoli stopped too much uptake of fat into the liver by decreasing the uptake and increasing the output of lipid from the liver," Jeffrey said.
The researchers noted that while eating broccoli improved liver health, it did not help with weight loss.
The study was published in the March 1 issue of the Journal of Nutrition.
