Broccoli Promotes the Healthy Ratio of Gastrointestinal Microbiota

By Kyle J. Norton

Intestinal health is a subject that covers multiple positive aspects of the gastrointestinal (GI) tract, including the effective digestion and absorption of food, promoting the balance of intestinal microbiota.

According to general knowledge, people who eat a diet with fruits and vegetables that are high in fiber including beans and legumes and berries, have been found to process a healthy microbiota.

Believe it or not, the human gut microbiota contains trillions of cells, including bacteria, viruses, and fungi. The gut microbiota is important to improve the digestive function in the absorption of nutrition, before passing them to the cells and tissues in the body.

Gut microbiota or gastrointestinal microbiota, the complex community of microorganisms in our digestive tracts plays a critical role in a variety of metabolic functions, including produced vitamins, synthesized all essential and nonessential amino acids, and carried out biotransformation of bile.

Gut microbiota protects the intestinal structures and functions by attaching to the gut wall against the entry of pathogenic, enteroinvasive bacteria into the epithelial cells.

In the immune perspective, gut microbiota protects the intestines by alerting the immune response against foreign invasion through specific receptors, leading to an immune system in inducing the proinflammatory cytokines.

However, the imbalance of digestive gut microbiota has been found to induce a number of diseases, syndromes, and functional aberrations, including inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) and irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), and wider systemic manifestations of disease such as obesity, and type 2 diabetes.

Imbalanced gut microbiota is found in obese patients, compared to healthy weight individuals.

In the immunity, the gut microbiota and immune system interact to protect each other to ensure the optimal function of both the digestive and immune system.

In other words, imbalanced gut microbiota not only causes the dysfunction of the digestive system but also reduces the functional immune system in the protection of the body against infection.

Broccoli is a mustard/cabbage plant, belongs to the family Brassicaceae. The veggie has large flower heads, usually green in color and the mass of flower heads surrounded by leaves and evolved from a wild cabbage plant on the continent of Europe.

On finding a potential plant that improves the gut functioning, researchers examined the effects of broccoli's glucosinolate hydrolysis activity on microbiota in the male C57BL/6 mice gut.

Glucosinolate hydrolysis activity is the process that can lead to a range of breakdown products, associated with the improvement of gut microbiota function.

Chronic raw or hydrolyzed broccoli fed mice not only increased the myrosinase-like activities of the colon and cecum contents, and also improved the NQO1 activity in the protection of protection against semiquinones and oxidative stress of the colon mucosa, compared to control mice.

In other words, broccoli ingestion showed a strong and positive effect on the composition of the gut bacteria community.

However, sinigrin, another type of glucosinolate isolated from broccoli does not demonstrate any effect on the gut composition.

Taken altogether, broccoli may be considered a functional food for the promotion of gut health, pending to the confirmation of the larger sample size and multicenter human study.

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Author Biography
Kyle J. Norton (Scholar, Master of Nutrition, All right reserved)
Health article writer and researcher; Over 10.000 articles and research papers have been written and published online, including worldwide health, ezine articles, article base, health blogs, self-growth, best before it's news, the karate GB daily, etc.,.
Named TOP 50 MEDICAL ESSAYS FOR ARTISTS & AUTHORS TO READ by Disilgold.com Named 50 of the best health Tweeters Canada - Huffington Post
Nominated for shorty award over last 4 years
Some articles have been used as references in medical research, such as international journal Pharma and Bioscience, ISSN 0975-6299.

Sources
(1) Broccoli ingestion increases the glucosinolate hydrolysis activity of microbiota in the mouse gut by Wu Y1,2, Shen Y1,2, Zhu Y1,2, Mupunga J1,2, Zou L3, Liu C3, Liu S1,2, Mao J. (PubMed)