Broccoli sprouts
Three days old and many times stronger than the grown vegetable. The only vegetable you grow on your own worktop.
How to use it
Raw, a handful, through a salad or over a plate that is already finished. They belong with the meal, not in the pan.
The best version
Grown yourself from organic sprouting seed. Shop-bought sprouts sit in a chiller for days and the active compound drains away. A glass jar with a sprouting lid is the whole kit.
How to prepare it
Rinse them twice a day for three to four days. Do not heat them: the enzyme that turns the precursor into sulforaphane does not survive a hot pan, and what you are left with is a garnish.
What it does
Sulforaphane, given as a concentrated broccoli sprout extract, lowered fasting blood glucose and HbA1c in obese patients with dysregulated type 2 diabetes. The same compound suppressed glucose production in the liver, by a different route than metformin takes.
Where the mechanism sits has been worked out in cells. The indoles and isothiocyanates from cruciferous vegetables, sulforaphane from these sprouts among them, triggered the death of damaged cells in two human colon cell lines. They also raised the defence enzymes the cell makes itself, by up to seventeen times, and when the cells were then exposed to a carcinogen they were left with under twenty percent of the DNA breaks.
In obese mice, glucoraphanin, the precursor of sulforaphane in these sprouts, did three things: energy expenditure went up, white fat began to behave more like brown fat, and the inflammation and insulin resistance that come with obesity went down.
Watch out
Those two studies are about cells in a dish and about mice. A mechanism that works in a cell is not evidence that it does anything in a person, and keeping those apart is half the work on this site.
What was tested in people is a concentrated extract, not a handful of sprouts. What grows on your worktop delivers less, and nobody has worked out how much less. Eat them because they are a cheap and potent vegetable, not to manage your blood sugar.
Sprouts grow warm and wet, which is what bacteria want too. Rinse twice a day, use clean water, and throw them out if they turn slimy or smell sour.