Wow, red cabbage… what a great idea for a blog post… NOT! Or is it?

Admittedly, it’s not the sexiest vegetable out there, but have you ever stopped to think about the red cabbage? For a long time, I haven’t really been a big fan of it and to be honest, it was mainly because I just didn’t know what to do with it!

But since it’s one of the local and currently seasonal vegetables available in the UK and other parts of Northern Europe, I thought it might be worth looking into. Here’s what I found out:

Red cabbage is one of the most beneficial types of cabbages and other cruciferous vegetables (things like broccoli, sprouts, cabbages and the like). Its positive impact on our health seems to be mainly due to its strong antioxidant effects and its benefits are so numerous that I can’t put them all in this blog, so I have chosen just two main perks to make my point:

It has anti-cancer effects, studies mainly showing an impact on liver cancer, intestinal cancer and breast cancer. It seems that red cabbage is able to stop cancer cells growing and can even persuade cancer cells to to initiate apoptosis, or cell death. So, it basically tells cancer cells to commit suicide!

Red cabbage also seems to be able to lower blood sugar. It increases our body’s sensitivity to insulin, therefore increasing our ability to remove sugar from our blood. At the same time, it seems that red cabbage has a protective effect on the cells that produce insulin (called beta-cells in our pancreas), which results in us having more insulin to deal with our blood sugar.

As you can see, this miraculous vegetable is not only readily available, local, seasonal and cheap, it also seems to have numerous assets which affect major health issues of our modern society, like cancer and diabetes.

So for TODAY’S CHALLENGE, I wanted to motivate you all to start introducing red cabbage more often into your diet. I’ve put in a recipe below for a healthy Red cabbage Slaw and I challenge you to try it out this week ! Make sure you get local cabbage, but to be honest, that shouldn’t be too difficult, as “’tis the season”!

And if you still need convincing: Not only is this recipe good for your health, it’s also good for our planet, because you’ll be using locally sourced produce and supporting local farmers as well!