UCLA study finds that broccoli may help boost the aging immune system

Paraphrasing Mad Magazine, this study comes from the Department of Tell Me Something I Don't Already Know ... it turns out that broccoli is good for you! To be honest, I didn't need a well-funded UCLA study (and certainly not one published in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology) to tell me that broccoli has a set of "antioxidant genes and enzymes in specific immune cells, which then combat the injurious effects of molecules known as free radicals that can damage cells and lead to disease." Granted this study is rather clear on the anti-aging promise of broccoli:

...the ability of aged tissues to reinvigorate their antioxidant defense can play an important role in reversing much of the negative impact of free radicals on the immune system. "Our defense against oxidative stress damage may determine at what rate we age, how it will manifest and how to interfere in those processes," said Dr. Andre Nel, the study's principal investigator and chief of nanomedicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. "In particular, our study shows that a chemical present in broccoli is capable of stimulating a wide range of antioxidant defense pathways and may be able to interfere with the age-related decline in immune function."

However my challenge isn't in knowing that broccoli is good for me, it's in figuring out how to get it into my diet. First off, I'm not a huge fan of broccoli. I'll toss it on a salad if I'm at a salad bar and I'll occasionally get in soup or as a side dish but likely not nearly enough as the white mice at UCLA were being fed. Broccoli is a perfect example of what I believe remains the biggest issue in health care. It's not that we don't know what is good for us, it's that we can't figure out a way to make it part of our daily life. For example, there isn't a single obese human in this country that doesn't know that they should be getting regular exercise, but how many go and do something about it? If the UCLA scientists want to make a real contribution to the world, and I'm sure that they do, they should be working on how to make tasty no cholesterol broccoli french fries or pancakes made with broccoli that taste better than those made with flour. Until they do, getting people like me to consume as much broccoli as we should is going to continue to be an uphill battle.