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Creative Minds: Broccoli, Microbes, & You
Posted on by Dr. Francis Collins
Eat your broccoli! It’s a plea made every night at dinner tables across the country. And it’s a plea worth listening to, because broccoli and other cruciferous vegetables—such as kale, cabbage, and cauliflower—are a rich source of healthful nutrients [1].
But the reasons that these veggies are good for us turn out to be more complicated (and more interesting) than people thought in the past. Whether your body can take full advantage of the health benefits of these veggies may, in fact, depend on the microbes (bacteria) living in your gut.
Elizabeth Sattely, winner of a 2013 NIH Director’s New Innovator Award and a chemical engineering professor at Stanford University in California, is now busy learning more about how our bodies process the nutrients in the vegetables we consume. In particular, she wants to identify the species of microbes responsible for transforming each type of plant nutrient into beneficial health-promoting molecules, and then trace the chemical reactions involved.
