If there is any food that most Koreans love, it’s kimchi (a dish very similar to cabbage diet soup). These lightly pickled vegetables are a side dish for nearly every meal, including breakfast. Kimchi can be made from radish, turnip, perilla leaves (the green leafy vegetable sometimes served with tempura), cucumbers, or cabbage, but researchers have found a special, cancer-protective effect from the kimchee made with cabbage.
The Department of Preventive Medicine at Hangyang University in Seoul studied 136 patients who had been diagnosed with stomach cancer, comparing them with 136 patients who stayed healthy. Certain foods were favorites of the patients who developed stomach cancer:
- Grilled beef,
- Radish kimchi,
- A very salty stew made with pollack (the cold-water ocean fish), and, oddly enough,
- Spinach.
The patients who did not develop stomach cancer tended to eat more:
- Soybean milk,
- Garlic,
- Mushrooms, and
- kimchi, a cabbage diet soup.
How Cabbage Diet Soup Protects Stomachs From Cancer
One of the reasons cabbage diet soup seems to prevent not just stomach cancer but also breast and lung cancer is that it provides a group of chemicals known as the glucosinolates. These beneficial chemicals keep certain metabolic pathways in the liver busy so that it never activates carcinogenic compounds into their harmful form. Not everyone has genetics that make this effect especially strong, however, and cooking the cabbage for more than 2 minutes destroys about 50 per cent of these useful compounds. Cooking cabbage longer than 10 minutes destroys 70 per cent of the glucosinolates.
Cabbage Soup Especially Protective
When cabbage is cooked into cabbage soup (like for a cabbage soup diet), however, it has an additional anti-cancer effect. The fiber in cooked cabbage is especially potent for binding with bile salts. The liver expels excess estrogen and testosterone with bile salts, and cabbage fiber “catches” the potentially harmful hormones and ensures that they are expelled with the stool rather than returning to the bloodstream.
What’s the best way to cook cabbage diet soup?
The highest concentration of healing chemicals is conserved when the cabbage soup is:
- Prepared by bringing the soup stock to a boil and then throwing in a handful of cabbage, allowing the mixture to cook for no more than 5 minutes or
- Simmering all the ingredients except cabbage at the beginning of the week, and adding raw cabbage just before you microwave the cup of soup for no more than 2 minutes to warm it up.
The less you cook your cabbage, the more nutrition it gives you. There is the same amount of fiber in cooked and raw cabbage, so, as long as you are eating the recommended 1 cup or bowl of cabbage per meal, you should be able to reap many of the benefits as you’d get from cabbage diet soup itself.