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Popeye might want to consider switching to broccoli. British scientists unveiled a new breed of the vegetable that experts say packs a big nutritional punch.

The new broccoli was specially grown to contain two to three times the normal amount of glucoraphanin, a nutrient believed to help ward off heart disease.

“Vegetables are a medicine cabinet already,” said Richard Mithen, who led the team of scientists at the Institute for Food Research in Norwich, England, that developed the new broccoli. “When you eat this broccoli … you get a reduction in cholesterol in your blood stream,” he told Associated Press Television.

An AP reporter who tasted the new broccoli found it was the same as the regular broccoli. Scientists, however, said it should taste slightly sweeter because it contains less sulphur.

Glucoraphanin works by breaking fat down in the body, preventing it from clogging the arteries. It is only found in broccoli in significant amounts.

To create the vegetable, sold as “super broccoli,” Mithen and colleagues cross-bred a traditional British broccoli with a wild, bitter Sicilian variety that has no flowery head, and a big dose of glucoraphanin. After 14 years, the enhanced hybrid was produced, which has been granted a patent by European authorities. No genetic modification was used.

It’s been on sale as Beneforte in select stores in California and Texas for the last year, and hit British shelves this month. Later this fall, the broccoli will be rolled out across the U.S.

The super vegetable is part of an increasing tendency among producers to inject extra nutrients into foods, ranging from calcium-enriched orange juice to fortified sugary cereals and milk with added omega 3 fatty acids. In Britain, the new broccoli is sold as part of a line of vegetables that includes mushrooms with extra vitamin D, and tomatoes and potatoes with added selenium.

Beneforte Broccoli

Not enough data exists to know if anyone could overdose on glucoraphanin, but vitamin D and selenium in very high quantities can be toxic.

Mithen and colleagues are conducting human trials comparing the heart health of people eating the super broccoli to those who eat regular broccoli or no broccoli. They plan to submit the data to the European Food Safety Agency next year so they can claim in advertisements the broccoli has proven health benefits.

“There’s a lot of circumstantial evidence that points to (glucoraphanin and related compounds) as the most important preventive agents for (heart attacks) and certain cancers, so it’s a reasonable thing to do,” said Lars Ove Dragsted, a professor in the department of human nutrition at the University of Copenhagen. He previously sat on panels at the International Agency for Research on Cancer examining the link between vegetables and cancer.

Dragsted said glucoraphanin is a mildly toxic compound used by plants to fight insects. In humans, glucoraphanin may stimulate our bodies’ natural chemical defenses, potentially making the body stronger at removing dangerous compounds.

Other experts said eating foods packed with extra nutrients would probably only have a minimal impact compared with other lifestyle choices, like not smoking and exercising.

“Eating this new broccoli is not going to counteract your bad habits,” said Glenys Jones, a nutritionist at Britain’s Medical Research Council. She doubted whether adding the nutrients in broccoli to more popular foods would work to improve people’s overall health.

“If you added this to a burger, people might think it’s then a healthy food and eat more burgers, whereas this is not something they should be eating more of,” Jones said. She also thought the super broccoli’s U.K. price — it costs about a third more than regular broccoli — might discourage penny-pinching customers.

But that wasn’t enough to deter Suzanne Johnson, a 43-year-old mother of two young children in London.

“I’m very concerned about the food they eat and would happily pay a bit more to buy something that has an added benefit,” Johnson said.

But for her children, taste is ultimately more important than any nutritional value. “Broccoli is one of the vegetables they actually like, so I’m glad it’s the one (scientists) have been working on,” she said. “This wouldn’t work if it had been mushrooms or asparagus.”

Adding to the mixed bag of research on bisphenol A and diabetes, a new study suggests that people with higher urinary levels of the controversial chemical do have a higher risk of diabetes.

Bisphenol A — better known as BPA — is a so-called endocrine disruptor, which means it may affect normal hormone activity in the body.

It’s also all around us. BPA has been used for decades to make hard plastic containers, as well as linings for metal food and drink cans. Research suggests that most people have some amount of BPA in their blood, including about 95 percent of Americans.

Recent animal studies have hinted that the chemical could play a role in certain cancers, heart disease and abnormal brain development in children. But BPA’s true effects in humans remain unknown.

Two large studies have found a link between higher BPA levels and higher heart disease risk. And a 2008 study found that of Americans in a government health survey, those with higher BPA levels showed a higher diabetes risk.

None of that, however, proves cause-and-effect. And a recent study of Chinese adults found no link between BPA levels and diabetes risk.

This latest study is based on data from a federal health study done between 2003 and 2008. Researchers found that of nearly 4,000 U.S. adults involved, those with the highest urinary BPA levels were more likely to have diabetes.

Just under 12 percent of all study participants had diabetes, based on blood sugar tests. And the odds of having the disease rose as urinary BPA increased.

Of people with the highest levels (more than 4.2 nanograms per milliliter, ng/mL), almost 13 percent had diabetes, versus 8 percent of adults with the lowest BPA levels (less than 1.1 ng/mL)

For comparison, the typical urinary BPA level among Americans has stood at about 2 ng/mL in recent years.

The findings, reported in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism, do not prove that BPA is responsible for the higher diabetes risk.

Diabetes

“Since BPA measurements as well as diabetes diagnosis were conducted at the same time, we cannot say for sure that BPA exposure preceded diabetes development,” lead researcher Dr. Anoop Shankar, of the West Virginia University School of Medicine, said in an email.

The researchers did account for a number of other factors in diabetes risk — like body weight, age and race. And the BPA-diabetes link still held; people with the highest levels had a 68 percent greater risk of diabetes than those with the lowest levels.

But what’s needed, according to Shankar, are long-term studies that start with diabetes-free adults, measure their BPA levels, then see who develops diabetes over time.

Shankar said he and his colleagues are planning such a study.

Exactly how BPA might promote diabetes is unclear. Lab research suggests that BPA can act like a hormone in the body and, in animals at least, promote weight gain.

In this study, Shankar’s team found that BPA levels were related to diabetes risk in both heavy and normal-weight people. But there may be pathways other than weight gain, according to Shankar.

BPA may, for instance, promote body-wide inflammation, which is linked to diabetes and a range of other chronic diseases. Again, though, that’s based on animal research.

In general, experts say that people who are concerned about BPA can try cutting down on canned foods and avoiding food containers made of polycarbonate plastics — especially for reheating food, since high heat may transfer small amounts of BPA into food.

Polycarbonate plastics are usually marked with the recycling code “7.”

Due to the controversy over BPA, the major manufacturers of infant bottles and feeding cups in the U.S. have stopped using the chemical.