[Rhonda]: Yeah, I'm convinced, yeah.
You know, and the other thing is smokers.
Smokers get bladder cancer and that, you know...I think, first of all, people that smoke should
quit smoking first and foremost, but if they don't quit smoking, I mean, I think they should
be consuming broccoli sprouts like nobody's business because they're accumulating so much
benzene and all sorts of carcinogens.
[Jed]: I used to know a seedsman, a guy who ran a seed company and he smoked like a chimney,
smoked cigarettes, and when he learned about the broccoli sprouts story, he would eat a
handful of broccoli, toast a handful of broccoli seeds and eat them.
And he claimed that he was doing that to counterbalance the cigarettes.
I couldn't advise him on that.
Well, you mentioned benzene a number of times and we didn't talk about the China studies
but with our colleague, Tom Kensler, and many others, we did a series of studies over the
years starting in about 2002.
Interestingly, it started out in an area of China, a subsistence farming area just north
of Shanghai where there was a lot of aflatoxin exposure.
And so we were looking at liver cancer risk, looking at biomarkers of liver cancer and
excretion of aflatoxin adducts vis-à-vis intake of sulforaphane.
Over time, as those studies progressed, there was a series of studies.
The liver cancer risks started to come down because they were exporting their contaminated
grain to other parts of China from this region, and with globalization, they were importing
more and more food.
So their diet was becoming less aflatoxin-rich.
But at the same time, of course, air pollution was going through the roof.
And so the most recent of those studies we published in 2014 showed, really, a dramatic
enhancement of the clearance of benzene, and acrolein, and other pollutant conjugates in
lockstep with broccoli sprout extract consumption.
[Rhonda]: It was a 60% increase in excretion, which is just phenomenal.
And it convinced me, like it definitely is a problem not only in China, but...
[Jed]: India.
[Rhonda]: India, yeah.
I mean, but we've got air pollution here in the U.S. and I live next to a busy street.
And I see all sorts of things accumulating in my place, you know.
So I'm taking that for my benzene excretion, as well.
So it's very powerful and it was just within 24 hours.
[Jed]: It's a dramatic effect and there...
So that's an interesting public health dilemma.
You can tell someone not to smoke.
You can sort of say in the back of your mind, I would never say this out loud, but in the
back of your mind, you can say, "They had it coming.
The idiots wouldn't stop smoking."
We never say things like that.
It's not politically correct.
But with air pollution, you've got...I mean, people are trapped whether it's highly educated
people like you that are living on the street where you know there's pollution or people
in the developing world where, you know...
[Rhonda]: You have to breathe.
[Jed]: You got to breathe.
[Rhonda]: You have to breathe and air pollution is...
[Jed]: You got to eat, and breathe, and sleep, and we can go on.
[Rhonda]: Yeah.
it's becoming...
It's an increasing problem and I've seen just more and more studies.
You know, a lot of people have focused on the effects on respiratory inflammation and
those sorts of, which are very obvious.
But like I said, the other health disease risk that's really becoming evident with air
pollution is actually heart attacks and stroke because it's causing...
It's low-level chronic inflammation.
You know, and that's, of course, where sulforaphane shines.
You know, I mean, it's inhibiting NF-KappaB pathway, like you said, activating all these
anti-inflammatory pathways.
So it seems like a no-brainer.
It would be nice to get something like that into China and India, broccoli sprout.
Well, I guess in India, they've got moringa.
[Jed]: True, true.
So if I were doing a sort of a similar sister study to the broccoli sprout air pollution
study in India, I would want to do it with moringa.