A new study claims that diabetes can be wiped off with the cruciferous vegetable- broccoli. Researchers have suggested that consuming extracts of broccoli may help the people suffering from Type 2 diabetes control their blood sugar level. With its vitamins, fibre and disease-fighting phytochemicals, broccoli may help reverse the disease signature. Broccoli has many health benefits. It helps in cholesterol reduction, bone health improvement, detoxification, better digestion and improvement in eye health. Not only that, an evidence has been provided that, it can even eliminate the growth of cancer cells.
Type 2 diabetes is so common these days that around 450 million people in the world suffer from this type of diabetes and as many as 15 percent of those patients cannot take the first-line therapy metformin because of kidney damage risks.
In the study, conducted on rats, this compound reduced glucose production by liver cells that were growing in culture and shifted the liver gene expression away from a diseased state in the rats with diabetes. Sulforaphane reversed the disease signature in the livers from diabetic animals and cut exaggerated glucose production and glucose intolerance by a magnitude like that of metformin, said Annika Axelsson from the Lund University in Sweden. In addition, sulforaphane provided as concentrated broccoli sprout extract reduced fasting blood glucose and glycated haemoglobin (HbA1c) in obese patients with dysregulated Type 2 diabetes.
When the researchers gave concentrated broccoli sprout extracts to 97 human Type 2 diabetes patients in a 12-week randomised placebo-controlled trial, obese participants who had dysregulated disease demonstrated significantly decreased fasting blood glucose levels compared to controls.
For the study, appearing in the journal Science Translational Medicine, the team constructed a signature for Type 2 diabetes based on 50 genes, then used publically available expression datasets to screen 3,852 compounds for drugs that potentially reverse disease.
