POWER SPROUTS

By Christine Gorman

George Bush may have been right about broccoli after all. According to a team of scientists from Johns Hopkins University, you don't have to eat a full helping of the hated vegetable to get the health benefits; a spoonful of crunchy broccoli sprouts will do the trick. Writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, the researchers report that three-day-old broccoli sprouts (which look something like alfalfa sprouts) contain the same cancer-fighting chemical, called sulforaphane, as full-grown spears--but at concentrations 20 to 50 times as high.

This is not the first time that scientists have lauded broccoli's anticancer benefits. Johns Hopkins' Dr. Paul Talalay and his colleagues first isolated sulforaphane from broccoli in 1992. Tests showed that the compound reduced the incidence of breast tumors in rats by 60%. While vitamin E and other antioxidants attack rogue cancer-causing molecules directly, sulforaphane works indirectly by boosting the body's cancer-fighting defenses. Not all broccoli plants are created equal, however. The amount of sulforaphane found in fresh broccoli varies wildly, making the vegetable an unreliable anticancer agent.

That's where the sprouts come in. After analyzing 50 different varieties of broccoli, the Hopkins researchers discovered that 15 of those strains produced seedlings with extraordinarily high concentrations of sulforaphane. The sprouts have a mildly spicy taste, which should make them more palatable than full-grown broccoli, especially when sprinkled on sandwiches and salads. But you probably won't find them at your local health-food store--not yet, anyway. And Talalay cautions do-it-yourselfers against trying to grow their own sprouts. Most broccoli seeds, he notes, are soaked in fungicides and pesticides.

--By Christine Gorman. Reported by David Bjerklie/New York

With reporting by David Bjerklie/New York