Review: Sulforaphane's Rapid Detoxification of Airborne Pollutants

Detoxification is one of the three main benefits of sulforaphane that I talk about regularly.  Unfortunately, there is a massive amount of confusion about what detoxification is due to fad cleanses, flushes, and detox programs.  When you dig a bit deeper into such programs, they are largely untested and usually are focused on the first Phase of detox and miss Phases II and III.  Often these detox programs are tied to some health guru and are inordinately expensive. 

As many of you know, the three phases of detox are:

Phase I -when the toxin is chemically changed through enzymes to make it less toxic.

Phase II - the toxin is chemically altered again through different enzymes in order to make it water soluble so it will go into the blood, so it can be removed.

Finally, Phase III where the toxin is excreted through urine or feces.  

We are exposed to toxins in three main ways:

• The air we inhale (e.g., tobacco smoke),
• The food and drink we ingest (e.g., pesticides or preservatives),
• The chemicals that absorb through our skin (e.g. mercury or flame retardant on clothing).

If you’re looking for something to help you detox for the new year, look no further than BrocElite.  The naturally derived stabilized sulforaphane is the best Phase II detoxifier of any natural compound, and also works in Phase I and III.  And remember, detoxification doesn’t just happen in your liver.  Every cell in your body has a detox mechanism (the Nrf-2 pathway) that sulforaphane turns on.

The efficacy of sulforaphane in detoxification is exemplified well in a research paper from 2014.  Here Hopkins researchers partnered with researchers in Qidong, a city about 40 miles north of Shanghai.  Qidong was chosen due to the significant amount of air pollution found in the city from industrialization. 

In the study, 292 people took approximately 14 mg of sulforaphane a day over 12 weeks by drinking a broccoli sprout beverage. Researchers found that those drinking the sulforaphane had an increase of conjugates of benzene (61% increase), acrolein (23% increase), compared to those drinking a placebo beverage.  Benzene and acrolein are very common toxins in industrial airborne pollutants.   

This is one of my favorite studies because of how clearly it exemplifies that sulforaphane works in all three phases of detoxification to remove pollutants that enter the body through inhalation or breathing.   

So, if you’re evaluating a flush, cleanse or detox program, always ask to see the research.  If there isn’t any research to back the claims that the program is making, then don’t buy it.  Sulforaphane has lots of research on how well it works with detoxification in the peer-reviewed literature.