 Last year's scientific data gave us reason to stop eating raw alfalfa sprouts because of the related outbreaks of food poisoning. But what about broccoli sprouts? Check out this study. They burned someone's arm with a UV laser here and here. They didn't burn, but on the left side they had first essentially just rubbed some broccoli sprouts on the skin and you can visibly see the cellular protection. This is not like sunblock, the researchers repeated the experiment in a different place, but this time it rubbed on the sprout extract, washed it off, and then waited three days before burning the person again. The left side had some broccoli sprouts rubbed on essentially and washed off three days prior, and you can still see how protected the cells are. But what about the risk of food poisoning? 5 million packages of broccoli sprouts were tested for pathogens. Overall, did they find that raw broccoli sprouts are harmful? Harmless? Or helpful? Less than one in a thousand containers were contaminated, so go for it. Though raw alfalfa sprouts are indeed too risky to eat, eggs are linked every year to literally a thousand times more food poisoning than sprouts. Cell-infected eggs cause a foodborne epidemic every year in the United States, sickening more than 100,000 Americans annually.