EAT MORE BROCCOLI, FOR YOUR HEART

It is becoming more and more obvious that there are many plants, veges and fruits that have tremendous medical potential. Pharmas are not likely to do much research on them, as they cannot patent right a natural product and so cannot make money from them. Therefore, much is left to professional organisations, like heart foundations and heart associations to uncover all the hidden potentials in foods and fruits. I have always been watching brocolli, since the seventies when it was first revealed that they may have anti-cancer potentials. Since then, there have been an increasing number of reports that broccoli can reduce the incidence of cancers, retard cancers, strengthen heart muscles, and lately, the group of workers from the University of Warwick reported that broccoli can limit the vascular damage in diabetics. To me, that is a very important advance for diabetics.

Diabetes, after all is a vascular disease. High blood sugar, damages blood vessels. No one actually die from high blood sugar per se ( at least not in the modern era ). Before the days of insulin and in the late seventies and early eighties perhaps, we still have high blood sugar comas and death. But with Prof Alberti's work, hyperglycemic comas are very much a thing of the past ( except perhaps in underdeveloped societies, without medical care ). Diabetes mellitus, exerts her harmful effects on the blood vessel walls, damaging them and causing them to block, thereby causing heart attacks, strokes, diabetic renal disease resulting in renal failures, eye damage ( retinopathies ), and peripheral vascular disease. Patients die from these. Therefore any therapy that can stop or regress diabetic vascular damage, will help diabetics live longer and better. I think, the piece of research done by Warwick U was very much a basic science research, which now may have to be tested in a large scale control trial, costing millions of pounds, and I think that that will never be done. So that a;though we all think that broccoli is good for us and diabetics, we may never see the class 1 medical proof. How sad? indeed, if broccoli is as good as claimed, it will save the ministry of Health so much money, and of cause the cost of broccoli will rise. Anyway, I will continue to keep you all posted on natural food substances that are of helpful health benefits to all of us. By the way, five servings of veges or fruits a day, will keep the doctor away, and some of the veges should be broccoli.