Why You Should Eat Sulfur-Rich Vegetables

"Be sure to eat your sulfur."

"When's the last time someone told you that? Except for the Wahls talk, probably never. My mother certainly didn't.

Few people even know much about sulfur besides the whole rotten egg, fire and brimstone thing. It's a mineral with a role in our physiology, but it doesn't showboat like the obscenely corporeal calcium, forming bones and teeth that you can literally feel and see. It won't immediately soothe your restless muscles or put you right to sleep, like magnesium. Unlike zinc, it doesn't figure prominently in the production of a sexy hormone like testosterone. And though you can take iodine and get an instant reaction from your thyroid, taking sulfur doesn't produce anything tangible. In short, sulfur lurks in the background and keeps a low profile.

So why does Terry Wahls promote the consumption of three cups of sulfur-rich vegetables every day?

Before we get to that, let's define what we're discussing here. What exactly qualifies as a sulfur-rich vegetable? Any and all fibrous non-leafy (although some have leaves, they're never the culinary focus) usually-green vegetables that steam well and emit a distinctive, offensive-to-some odor probably contain considerable amounts of sulfur and can be called "sulfur-rich":

Brassicas – cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, bok choy, and related vegetables.
Alliums – onions, shallots, garlic, leeks.
Lots of edible stalks, lovely smells if you cook it wrong, and a tendency to go well with lemon butter. That sort of thing.

Back to Wahls' recommendation to eat more sulfur. What's the justification for it?

Well, by weight, sulfur is one of the most abundant mineral elements in the human body, coming in at around 140 grams for the average person. And as any regular reader of this blog should know, you don't get to be an abundant mineral in human physiology by accident. Nope: sulfur is involved in hundreds of physiological processes. Let's explore some of the big ones:"

I eat fresh garlic every day and haven't had a cold or flu for fifteen years.
There was a reason for ancient Egyptians eating onions as a staple.