Kale and the Immune System

There were some extraordinary reports last year on cruciferous vegetables. For example, the immunostimulatory effects of kale. So simple an experiment I don’t know why it hasn’t been done before. Roll up your sleeve, take some white blood cells, drip a little kale on, and see if it boosts their ability to produce antibodies. Here’s the control—no kale, which is basically the Standard American Diet. Though if you check with the USDA, we do consume, as a country, annually per capita, 0.28793567 and change pounds. That’s a cup of kale per person per year. So the average American is responsible for eating about a half teaspoon of kale a week, and kale consumption is in decline.

So anyways, here’s the control. Then you start adding a billionth of a gram of kale protein per liter—just slightly less than U.S. consumption, and look at that spike, quadrupling antibody production with kale. “These data provide valuable information to confirm yet another beneficial function of kale.”

Now that’s for raw kale. What if you cooked it? And not just cooked it, but cooked it to death—boiled it, for half an hour? What do you think happened? Did boiling abolish its immunostimulatory effect? Here’s the control again. The filled circles will be the cooked; the unfilled, the raw, and the cooked appeared to work even better.

To see any graphs, charts, graphics, images, and quotes to which Dr. Greger may be referring, watch the above video. This is just an approximation of the audio contributed by veganmontreal.

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• Nishi K, Kondo A, Okamoto T, Nakano H, Daifuku M, Nishimoto S, Ochi K, Takaoka T, Sugahara T. Immunostimulatory in vitro and in vivo effects of a water-soluble extract from kale. Biosci Biotechnol Biochem. 2011;75(1):40-6.

Images thanks to Martin King via flickr, and Clindberg via Wikimedia Commons.

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