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A Little Bitter, A Lot Better
Enhanced veggies may save lives
By Becky Beyers
“Eat your vegetables” has long been good advice for those who want to stay healthy. Now, imagine having access to super-vegetables with extra cancer-fighting properties – and they taste good.
That’s the vision of scientists at the Southern Research and Outreach Center (SROC) in Waseca, where ongoing experiments are aimed at developing a way to consistently mass-produce vegetables with high levels of cancer-preventing compounds found in cruciferous vegetables like cabbage, broccoli, Brussels sprouts and turnips.
Cruciferous vegetables naturally produce compounds called glucosinolates as a way to fend off disease and insect attack, says Vince Fritz, a professor in the Department of Horticultural Science who’s located at the SROC. Because plants produce these compounds as a response to stress, scientists at the SROC are experimenting with different environmental stressors – water, light, fertility or temperature, for example – to trigger the plants to create more of the healthy phytochemicals. Experiments so far have concluded:
• More crowded plants in the field produced the compounds more uniformly from plant to plant.
• Red cabbage varieties have greater concentrations of the healthy compounds than green varieties.
• Cabbage placed in optimum storage conditions for as long as four months shows no sign of compound degradation. |
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This growing season’s experiments at the SROC will include, among other things, determining whether using different colored plastic mulches in the field can affect production of targeted compounds in turnips.
The plant’s ability to produce these cancer-preventing agents is measured through a process of harvesting the vegetables, then boiling, pureeing and freezing samples, before analyzing them via chromatography. Most experiments have involved cabbage, although watercress, turnips, Chinese cabbage and Brussels sprouts also have been studied.
The researchers’ task has an additional complication: the bitter taste in many of these vegetables comes from the very same chemicals that make them cancer-fighters. So scientists must balance their goal of boosting the glucosinolates in, say, Brussels sprouts without making them so bitter that consumers won’t eat them.
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Cabbage grown at the Waseca
research and outreach center
is tested for response to various
kinds of environmental stressors.
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