New Delhi: Broccoli has long since been established as one of the ultimate super veggies that are good for health.


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Its long list of health benefits include cholesterol reduction, bone health improvement, detoxification, better digestion and improvement in eye health. Not only that, recent studies have also provided evidence that broccoli can eliminate the growth of cancer cells.


Now, a new study has pointed out another problem that can be wiped off with the cruciferous vegetable – diabetes.


Researchers have suggested that consuming extracts of broccoli may help people with Type 2 diabetes to manage their blood sugar.


With its vitamins, fibre and disease-fighting phytochemicals, broccoli may help reverse the disease signature.


Type 2 diabetes affects around 450 million people worldwide 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 similar to 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 hemoglobin (HbA1c) in obese patients with dysregulated Type 2 diabetes.


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.


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.


(With IANS inputs)