[Rhonda]: I've noticed when I've made my broccoli sprout smoothie, after blending it, if I let
it sit in my cup for a prolonged period of time, it tastes different, like there is...and
I don't know if that's the sulforaphane or the sulforaphane nitriles or what chemical
reaction is going on there.
But it tastes different than if I just blend it up and drink it immediately.
[Jed]: I think it's probably the sulforaphane.
So when you blend it and drink it immediately, you probably haven't given enough time for
all of the glucosinolates to be converted to sulforaphane.
[Rhonda]: Do you have any idea how long, what the temporal sort of timeline in minutes?
[Jed]: Probably a couple of minutes to, yeah...
I mean, so when we did these conversions in big vats, 600...
I think there were 600...no, 200 or 300-gallon steam kettles at Oregon Freeze Dry, we added
daikon sprouts, homogenized and let the stew sit for 2 hours to get complete hydrolysis.
You can do the calculation of sort of the half-life of the enzyme and how fast it works.
And so it certainly, it takes a matter of many minutes.
So in your particular case, with your broccoli sprouts, maybe it was 10 minutes or maybe
it takes a half hour to get completely converted.
So probably what you were doing is chugging the not-so-nasty-tasting glucosinolates.
[Rhonda]: It does get more foul-tasting, as you had said, It does.
[Jed]: Yeah, exactly.
And so the conversion is happening on the way down the tubes and then, when it gets
to your intestines, probably more happens.
And I should mention, speaking of intestines, we have no idea where most of the myrosinase
activity is.
Most of the bacteria in your guts are in your large intestine.
But I wouldn't rule out the fact that a fair amount of conversion occurs in the small intestine,
too.
[Rhonda]: Really?
[Jed]: Yeah.
And I say that based on the fact on the pharmacokinetics that we see because we know that...we see
the metabolites of sulforaphane occur, appear in the blood within 10 minutes of ingestion.
[Rhonda]: That's pretty fast.
[Jed]: And when you talk to a gastroenterologist about gut transit time, it stands to reason
that it takes more than 10 minutes to get, or 15 minutes, to get all the way to your
large intestine and undergo a chemical reaction.
So, of course, it's very difficult to access the small intestine of a person, experimentally.
It's been done, but...
[Rhonda]: Do you know how long?
So, for example, if I drink my broccoli sprout on Monday, I'm going to activate Nrf2 while
I have some of these metabolites glutathione, things like that.
How long does that reaction occur before then?
Like, so I've been taking this broccoli smoothie when we're not traveling and we're home.
We're getting it, like, probably five days a week.
You know, do you have to take it every day or do you think that's sort of overkill?
Does it last longer?
Do you have any idea?
[Jed]: I think you are perfectly healthy.
You're good.
No, I think you should be fine.
Again, we don't know enough, but it's apparent certainly in animal systems and in the limited
number of cases where it's been looked at in people.
It's not like taking a drug.
It's not like taking an aspirin, which is going to be flushed from your system and the
pharmacokinetics look like this and they are there, it appears, its metabolites appear
and it's gone.
What you are doing when you take sulforaphane is you're up-regulating a bunch of enzymes.
And those enzymes have a rather long, comparatively, a rather long half-life meaning they don't
lose their punch.
They don't get deactivated or get broken down all that fast.
And their half-lives are on the order of days, maybe even weeks for some of them, but certainly
a few days is a reasonable guess for many of them.
So once you boost all these enzymes, they stay up-regulated, in other words, more active
for a period of time and then it goes away.