Found: A "Lettuce" That Fights Cancer
... and it's even more potent than we realized

Making a sandwich? From now on, instead of plopping on the same old lettuce, try using ½ cup of zesty broccoli sprouts. That one little switch might save your life by giving you rich doses of a compound called SGS (short for sulforaphane glucosinolate), which looks more than ever like a serious enemy of breast and colon cancers.

Paul Talalay, MD, the distinguished Johns Hopkins pharmacologist who identified SGS as a cancer fighter, believes the evidence is strong that SGS in broccoli sprouts can help stop cancer "in the very long and silent period during which cancer develops and before it can be diagnosed." Dr. Talalay stresses that we still need studies to confirm the anticancer power of SGS in humans.

SGS is present in many cruciferous veggies such as broccoli. But in 1997, researchers at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore discovered something astounding: Three-day-old sprouts grown from certain broccoli seeds contained up to 50 times more anticancer SGS than mature broccoli!

How might SGS prevent cancer? We know that it inhibits mammary tumors from starting and growing in animals given a chemical that causes mammary cancer. And for the first time, studies show that SGS mounts a two-pronged attach on colon cancer: It inhibited precursors of colon cancer from getting started and growing in animals given a chemical that causes cancer.