 You'll hear folks in the raw food community waxing poetic about enzymes, important of preserving the activities of plant enzymes which are destroyed by cooking. Skeptics, on the other hand, indignantly assert that we have no use for plant enzymes since we're animals and make all the enzymes we need. Well, both sides are wrong. There are two known examples of plant enzymes serving physiologically useful functions and the production of sulforaphane is one of them. One of our most powerful phytonutrients, it is formed by an enzyme in broccoli. You cut or chew or chop up broccoli or broccoli sprouts and the enzyme is released and it gets to work making us a big batch of phytonutrient goodness. Cooking inactivates the enzymes though, so steamed broccoli doesn't have any. So why have experiments shown detectable sulforaphane levels in the blood and urine of people eating only cooked broccoli? Now I'm really confused. Were they sneaking raw broccoli on the side? No. How cool is this? Good bacteria that reside in our gut have the raw broccoli enzyme, too. So as soon as the cooked broccoli gets down there, the bacteria make sulforaphane for us. And the way they figure this out is that you incubate cooked vegetable juice with fresh human feces and voila! Sulforaphane is born. Not as much, though. To get the same amount of benefit in a cup of raw broccoli, you'd have to eat 10 cups of cooked broccoli. So I encourage people to try to eat their broccoli raw or alternatively chop the raw broccoli up first, wait 40 minutes for the enzyme to do its business, and then you can cook the heck out of it because the enzyme's job is already done. So the next time you want to make broccoli soup, put it in the blender raw, blend, wait, then cook. Safe for two, since you're not trying to blend hot liquids at the end. Or if you don't want to wait, you can, you know, those pre-packaged bags of pre-chopped broccoli in the produce aisle, more expensive, but more convenient and maybe even healthier because it's been building up anti-carcinogens the whole time in the store. For more on raw food controversies, I encourage everyone to go to their local library and check out Davis and Molina's Becoming Raw, which does the best job to date, summarizing the available evidence.