bookofjoe

BehindTheMedspeak: Wear your broccoli?

That's what it says on the front page of today's Washington Post.

You could look it up.

Rick Weiss's story about the apparent efficacy of broccoli-sprout extract — not ingested but, rather, smeared on the skin of hairless mice or people — in blocking the carcinogenic damage caused by UV rays in sunlight opens a whole new arena for the vegetarian-inclined.

Here's the article.

Broccoli Extract Could Help Head Off Skin Cancer

George H.W. Bush: Call your dermatologist.

New research suggests that broccoli, the vegetable that the former president famously demonized as inedible, can prevent the damage from ultraviolet light that often leads to skin cancer. And as Bush would surely appreciate, he would not even have to eat it.

In tests on people and hairless mice, a green smear of broccoli-sprout extract blocked the potentially cancer-causing damage usually inflicted by sunlight and showed potential advantages over sunscreens.

The product is still in the early stages of development. Among other issues to be worked out is how best to remove the extract's green pigments, which do not contribute to its protective effects and would give users a temporary Martian complexion.

But scientists said the research represents a significant advance because the extract works not by screening out the sun's rays — which has the downside of blocking sun-induced Vitamin D production — but by turning on the body's natural cancer-fighting machinery. Once stimulated, those mechanisms work for days, long after the extract is washed away.

"Ultraviolet radiation is probably the most universal and abundant carcinogen in the world," said Paul Talalay of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore [top, holding broccoli sprouts], who led the research, published yesterday in the online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. And although the new study stops short of proving that broccoli extracts can prevent human skin cancer, he said, it demonstrates "direct protection" against that carcinogen, which contributes to the 1 million U.S. skin cancer cases seen annually.

"It's very important work," said Michael Sporn, a professor of pharmacology at Dartmouth Medical School, who for nearly two decades headed the National Cancer Institute's program on cancer prevention by means of natural products.

"The use of dietary substances, like the antioxidant vitamins C and E, has been pretty much a colossal failure for protection against almost any kind of human disease," Sporn said, "because when you eat them they don't go where you want them to... and as soon as your body uses them up, they're gone."

By contrast, he said, boosting production of the body's own cancer-fighting mechanisms "is a new and promising approach."



Broccoli's rise from farm to pharma began in 1992 when Talalay and colleagues reported that broccoli — and especially three-day-old broccoli sprouts, they found later — is rich in sulforaphane, a compound that activates certain enzymes in the body.

Those "Phase 2" enzymes, such as glutathione S-transferase, can neutralize the DNA-damaging molecules that are created in the skin by the mix of oxygen and sunlight. They can also temper the inflammatory reactions that can turn precancerous cells into life-threatening tumors.

Talalay's discovery got his family and Johns Hopkins into the broccoli-sprout business. His son is chief executive of Brassica Protection Products LLC, which licensed the technology from Johns Hopkins and produces "BroccoSprouts" brand broccoli sprouts, a popular health food. But more recently Talalay has focused on sulforaphane as a topical protective against skin cancer.

His team exposed areas of volunteers' skin to intense ultraviolet light one to three days after the broccoli-sprout extract was applied to some areas. The extract was all but rubbed and washed away by the time the light exposure occurred, but by then the sulforaphane had turned on key genes in the skin cells, which beefed up production of Phase 2 enzymes.

Compared with untreated areas, spots treated with the extract had, on average, 37 percent less redness and inflammation — key measures of future skin cancer risk. Other tests have shown that mice treated with the extract get significantly fewer and smaller skin tumors after exposure to ultraviolet light.

Allan Conney, director of the laboratory for cancer research at Rutgers University's School of Pharmacy, warned that the work only hints at an ability to prevent cancers in people and that in the study, the extract's ability to reduce ultraviolet-induced damage varied considerably from person to person, from a low of about 8 percent protection to a high of 78 percent. Still, he said, the broccoli approach "could have truly broad significance."

Albena Dinkova-Kostova, co-leader of the new study with Talalay and now at the University of Dundee in Scotland, said several hurdles stand between the experiments and a broccoli-based anti-cancer skin cream.

Among them are the need to find the most effective concentration of sulforaphane, increase the active ingredient's shelf life, and improve skin absorption of sulforaphane. That last task was accomplished in the tests by mixing it with acetone, an ingredient in nail polish remover that, while safe in small quantities, is not something people would want to slather on their skin.

Then there is the extract's green tint, which would be absent if the team were to synthesize the sulforaphane instead of getting it from sprouts. But that would raise safety and regulatory concerns.

"The advantage of starting with sprouts is that we all eat broccoli so we're not concerned with toxicity issues," Dinkova-Kostova said, adding that she anticipated no problems getting the green out.

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Here's the abstract of the above-cited paper published yesterday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Sulforaphane mobilizes cellular defenses that protect skin against damage by UV radiation

UV radiation (UVR) is a complete carcinogen that elicits a constellation of pathological events, including direct DNA damage, generation of reactive oxidants that peroxidize lipids and damage other cellular components, initiation of inflammation, and suppression of the immune response. Recent dramatic increases in the incidence of nonmelanoma skin cancers are largely attributable to higher exposure of an aging population to UVR. Therefore, the development of cellular strategies for intrinsic protection of the skin against the deleterious effects of UVR is imperative. Here we show that erythema resulting from UVR is a comprehensive and noninvasive biomarker for assessing UVR damage and can be precisely and easily quantified in human skin. Topical application of sulforaphane-rich extracts of 3-day-old broccoli sprouts up-regulated phase 2 enzymes in the mouse and human skin, protected against UVR-induced inflammation and edema in mice, and reduced susceptibility to erythema arising from narrow-band 311-nm UVR in humans. In six human subjects (three males and three females, 28–53 years of age), the mean reduction in erythema across six doses of UVR (300–800 mJ/cm2 in 100 mJ/cm2 increments) was 37.7% (range 8.37–78.1%; P = 0.025). This protection against a carcinogen in humans is catalytic and long lasting.

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Everything you need to know about buying BroccoSprouts is right here.

World's most technical frozen water pipe preventer

Why put a sock over an outdoor faucet when you can trick it out with this puppy?

From websites:

Pipe Watchman™

Don't risk costly damage from burst pipes in your home, vacation cabin, RV or outbuildings.

Screw Pipe Watchman onto the outdoor faucet and turn the water on.

A small sensor in an internal microvalve recognizes a preset low temperature and allows a small amount of water to flow through the valve, preventing freezing.

When the water reaches a preset warmer temperature, the valve closes.

Made of high-impact polypropylene and enhanced resins with UV inhibitors.

Protects pipes 24/7 without wasting water.

Place one on every outside faucet.

$19.95.

We get email: From Donald J. Rippert, chief technology officer of Accenture

Clearly Don (above) has too much spare time on his hands.

How else to explain the fact that last evening, at precisely 6:49:47 p.m. ET, I received the following email from the CTO of the world's largest consultancy?

Joe:

Sorry to send an e-mail about a quote about young people not reading e-mails. However, I just saw your blog and figured that posting a comment on an entry from July 27 would be futile.

Thanks for the mention.

Regards,

Don Rippert

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Resistance may be futile but posting a comment on anything that's ever appeared here is not.

As I noted in my reply to Don last evening, "Not to worry — people leave comments on posts that appeared years, never mind months, ago. Throw it up there, there's plenty of room."

True.

How not to move a Maserati with a forklift

"A building worker in Sydney, Australia, found a dark blue Maserati sports car parked in a construction zone and decided to move it with the help of a forklift. The construction employee hoisted the car two metres into the air before it flipped off the forks and crashed on its roof."

[via Gerard Vlemming's The Presurfer and Arbroath]

Because something is happening here but you don't know what it is, do you, Mister joe?

Stipulated.

SafeType — 'World's best selling vertical keyboard'

That's different.

From the website:

How the Safetype Keyboard™ Works

It doesn't just move the problem to another area of the body.

It eliminates the 3 most damaging postures:

• Extension

• Pronation

• Ulnar Deviation

It solves real problems, not imaginary ones.

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Watch the movie and tell me you're not a little bit intrigued.

I know I was.

[via Sefton and limberthing.com]

Marble of Doom — 'What are you *@#% waiting for?'

Apple fanboys and fangirls know the sight all too well.

Hot/Cold Sheet Set

So cool.

I mean, that's hot!

Two — two — two sheets in one!

From the website:

Percale/Fleece Split Sheets Set

Half percale/half fleece, split sheets solve your too warm/too cool differences.

Sheets are split down the middle with cool percale on one side for warm sleepers and warm fleece on the other side for cold sleepers.

No-feel seam — there’s no bulky or noticeable dividing line between the fleece and cotton, so the only thing you feel is absolute comfort.

Eliminate the need for bed socks, bulky sleepwear, electric blankets, cooling fans and more.

Set includes flat sheet, fitted sheet with oversized 18" deep pockets and two pillow cases.

Pillowcases have fleece on one side and cotton on the other.

Machine wash.

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Clever.

$89.95-$99.95.