When I used to teach medical students at Tufts, I gave a lecture about this amazing new therapeutic called “iloccor-B.” I’d talk about all the new science, all the things it could do, its excellent safety profile. Just as they were all scrambling to buy stock in the company and prescribe it to all their patients, I’d do the big reveal. Apologizing for my “dyslexia,” I would admit that I’d got it backwards. All this time I had been talking about broccoli.

The main active ingredient in broccoli is thought to be sulforaphane, which may protect our brains, protect our eyesight, protect our bodies against free radicals, boost our detoxification enzymes, and help prevent and treat cancer.

In my videos The Best Detox and Sometimes the Enzyme Myth is the Truth, I talked about how the formation of sulforaphane is like a chemical flare reaction, requiring the mixing of a precursor compound with an enzyme, which is destroyed by cooking. This may explain why we get dramatic suppression of cancer cell growth from raw broccoli, cauliflower and Brussels sprouts, but hardly anything from boiled, microwaved or steamed (except for microwaved broccoli, which actually retains some cancer fighting abilities). But who wants to eat raw Brussels sprouts?

There is a strategy to get the benefits of raw in cooked form. In raw broccoli, the sulforaphane precursor, called glucoraphanin, mixes with the enzyme (myrosinase) when you chew or chop it. If given enough time—such as when sitting in your upper stomach waiting to get digested—sulforaphane is born. The precursor and sulforaphane are resistant to heat and therefore cooking, but the enzyme is destroyed. No enzyme = no sulforaphane.

That’s why I described the “hack and hold” technique—if we chop the broccoli, Brussels sprouts, kale, collards, or cauliflower first and then wait 40 minutes, we can cook them all we want. The sulforaphane is already made; the enzyme has already done its job, so we don’t need it anymore.