Get Your Food to Work Harder

You probably know that broccoli’s one of the great cancer fighters, but can you ever really eat enough to reap its benefits? And what about mushrooms? They’re also full of cancer-thwarting chemicals, but they’re hardly an everyday commodity. Even if you do manage to load up on enough of these foods to make a difference, you’d probably end up so stuffed that you’d neglect something else you need to stay healthy. Happily, a new study, published in Carcinogenesis, suggests that combining certain nutrients may make them more powerful than they would be separately. Researchers put the mineral selenium, found in poultry, mushrooms, nuts, fish, and eggs, and the phytochemical sulforaphane, found in broccoli, cabbage, sprouts, and watercress, to work on cell cultures in the lab. They found that the duo was 13 times more effective than either nutrient alone at improving the cancer-fighting action of certain cells. The study was sparked by one of the basic principles of Chinese herbal medicine, which says that using certain herbs in combination increases their efficacy. “I was interested to see if this notion also applied to dietary compounds,” says Yongping Bao, one of the study’s authors. The sheer number of nutrients in food means there may be any number of disease-fighting combos waiting to be discovered, he adds. In the meantime, congratulate yourself on dramatically increasing your food’s cancer-fighting power the next time you throw together a nice chicken, broccoli, and mushroom stir-fry.