The Benefits of Broccoli Sprouts

Today’s post is by Oliver Dowding, an organic farmer from South East Somerset who produces broccoli sprout and wheatgrass juice for their incredible health properties.

With something like 50 trillion cells comprising our bodies, we’re in charge of one humongous life system. We are also in charge of something more sophisticated than any machine which man has ever created, including the most apparently phenomenal supercomputers. Yet how do we treat this wonderful body of ours? Sadly, we often don’t treat it nearly well enough.

We are a culture saturated in process-adulterated and additive laden food, which is highly inadequate to please our cellular structure and deliver its needs. If we want our ‘machine’ to operate at optimum levels, what we actually require is the finest nutrition. Yet when our body, this finely-tuned mechanism, breaks down and we suffer disease (dis-ease), we turn to the medical profession where chemical and pharmaceutical solutions are usually the first port of call. Whilst in some ways this is understandable, unfortunately these drugs and procedures can also have the effect of putting immense stress on the body, distorting and distracting its natural mechanism.

So is there another way to improve health? I would suggest certainly yes, and diet is the perfect place to start. The broccoli sprout and wheatgrass juices I produce are just one example of the incredible health enhancing properties that can be found in natural and organic foods.


Both the wheatgrass and broccoli sprout juices I produce are grown hydroponically. No soil is used or wasted! No root medium is used as it’s not needed. We feed the crop with ocean solution, which is effectively (very pure) seawater which contains the complete spectrum of mineral elements, thus providing everything the plants require. They take what they need and are therefore complete, nutritionally.

The wheatgrass is harvested when 7 days old, the broccoli at five days, at the point of optimum nutrient concentration and value. Both are high pressure squeezed to extract the juice, which is placed in the sachets and then subjected to high pressure to seal them, and nullify any bugs which might impact shelf-life, whilst preserving in their original condition all the key nutrients.

How do they work? Wheat is one of nature’s rare plants that takes up all the minerals and creates a panoply of nutrients. Think about the world’s largest animals, which predominantly live off grass alone and thrive. The power pack of chlorophyll and many other enzyme rich nutrients serves to confer plenty of high-grade nutrition to the consumer, fuelling or repairing our complex bodies.

Broccoli has a different value. The juice is loaded with Sulforaphane Glucosinolate (SGS). This is only useful in the presence of myrosinase. The SGS is hydrolized by the myrosinase to yield an isothiocyanate: it is the isothiocyanate that does all those great things in treating or preventing many ghastly illnesses.

If you ingest SGS, such as by eating the raw sprouts, then the small amount of myrosinase that might be found in the gut will go to work on the SGS but the conversion rate will be low. But if you process the juice properly, as we do, the endogenous myrosinase in the plant material is released and the available SGS is converted at about 90% efficiency. Then one sachet of the juice (33 ml) contains a residual amount of SGS and a lot of isothiocyanate.  Independent analysis has identified about 36 mg of isothiocyanate and about 2 mg of SGS.

Chinese researchers have recently undertaken a significant sized, peer-reviewed trial investigating the evidence of the benefits of broccoli sprout juice. As we know, China has some of the worst levels of pollution in their cities and rising cancer rates. The researchers split the group, the control group was given fruit juice and the trial group broccoli sprout juice. They were staggered by the results. In just one day, the trial group saw benzene levels in their blood cut by 60%! Other compounds fell as well, although typically somewhat less than this, but what an incredible difference to have made in just 24 hours!

So whilst this is just one trial and one product, imagine what you could do if you got your entire diet right. It’s clearly not necessary to wait years for benefits to accrue. Furthermore, it doesn’t need to cost you a fortune. Have you ever stopped to think what ill-health will cost you? Have you considered the impact and cost upon your families and those who have to care for you?

This leads me to the point that people often make which is that buying organic food, or maybe something like wheatgrass and broccoli sprout juices, can seem expensive. In themselves, they probably are, but if you think in the fullness of your lives and the value you place on them, and if you manage properly the quantities of food which you need as opposed to over consuming or wasting food, the right things and the best things are highly affordable for the fast majority of people. And entirely worth it!

To purchase sachets of wheatgrass or broccoli sprout juice or find out more, please visit Oliver’s website http://www.tonicattack.com/.