Broccoli can do more than simply give color to your salad and boost your nutrition. New research out of the University of Illinois finds the cruciferous vegetable may offer protection against liver cancer.

The study, published in the Journal of Nutrition, also found that including broccoli in the diet may also help prevent the development of fatty liver or nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) which can cause malfunction of the liver and lead to hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) — a form of liver cancer with a high mortality rate.

The findings echo past studies that have shown that eating the vegetable three to five times per week can lower the risk of many types of cancer including breast, prostate, and colon cancers.

"The normal story about broccoli and health is that it can protect against a number of different cancers. But nobody had looked at liver cancer," said Elizabeth Jeffery, a UI emeritus professor of nutrition.

"We decided that liver cancer needed to be studied particularly because of the obesity epidemic in the U.S. It is already in the literature that obesity enhances the risk for liver cancer and this is particularly true for men. They have almost a five-fold greater risk for liver cancer if they are obese."

Jeffery noted most Americans eat a diet high in saturated fats and added sugars, which are stored in the liver and can be converted to body fat. Consuming a high-fat, high-sugar diet and having excess body fat is linked with the development of NAFLD, which can lead to diseases such as cirrhosis and liver cancer, she added.

"We called this a Westernized-style diet in the study because we wanted to model how so many of us are eating today," Jeffery said.

But the new research, which involved mice, found those given broccoli as part of their diets were less likely to develop cancerous nodules — findings Jeffrey’ said have implications for people, too.

"We found that the Westernized diet did increase fatty liver, but we saw that the broccoli protected against it. Broccoli stopped too much uptake of fat into the liver by decreasing the uptake and increasing the output of lipid from the liver," she said.

Jeffery's previous research shows that eating broccoli freshly chopped or lightly steamed is the best way to get to the vegetables' cancer-fighting compound, sulforaphane.

Although the researchers only used broccoli in the study, Jeffery adds that other brassica vegetables, such as cauliflower or Brussel sprouts, may have the same effect.

The study was funded, in part, by National Cancer Institute, which is part of the National Institutes of Health.