Broccoli

Broccoli was certainly an Italian vegetable, as its name suggests, long before it was eaten elsewhere. Its first mention in France is in 1560, but in 1724 broccoli was still so unfamiliar in England that Philip Miller's Gardener's Dictionary (1724 edition) referred to it as a stranger in England and explained it as "sprout colli-flower" or "Italian asparagus". In the American colonies, Thomas Jefferson was also an experimentative gardener with a wide circle of European correspondents, from whom he got packets of seeds for rare vegetables such as tomatoes, noted the planting of broccoli at Monticello along with radishes, lettuce, and cauliflower on May 27, 1767. Nevertheless, broccoli remained an exotic in American gardens. In 1775, John Randolph, in A Treatise on Gardening by a Citizen of Virginia, felt he had to explain about broccoli: "The stems will eat like Asparagus, and the heads like Cauliflower."

Broccoli Nutrition Facts: Calories, Carbs, and Health Benefits

The composition of broccoli is 89.3% water, 6.64% carbohydrates, 2.82% protein, 2.6% dietary fiber, and 0.37% fat. One broccoli flower cluster will give you with 0.73 grams of carbohydrates. It is equal to 0.56 percent of the 130 grams of carbohydrates you need on a daily basis. That same in an amount measuring 100 grams (3.5 Oz), broccoli provides 141 kilojoules (34 kilocalories) of energy and is a rich source of Vitamin C (ascorbic acid) and Vitamin K1 (phylloquinone) (118.93% and 112.89% of the Daily Value, respectively). This means that if you add broccoli in your diet it will help your body to reduce probability of heart disease by fighting cholesterol, reduce the risk of anemia as this vitamin absorbs iron, improve the efficiency of lymphocytes (or white blood cells) to heal wounds and will be effective against dementia since vitamin C impacts memory positivelyhigh blood pressurethe occurrence of cancer. Besides it it contains a good amount of Manganese (11.67% DV).

The English term “broccoli” comes from the Italian word broccolo, meaning “the flowering crest of a cabbage”; and the Latin brachium, meaning “arm” or “branch.”
Broccoli is a human invention. It was bred out of the wild cabbage plant, Brassica oleracea. It was cultivated to have a specific taste and flavor that was more palatable to people
The average American eats over 4 pounds of the cruciferous vegetable per year. California produces 90 percent of the nation’s broccoli.China, however, is the leading producer of the vegetable, over 8 million tons per year.
California produces almost all of the broccoli sold in the United States.
Broccoli is a giant floret composed of countless little flowers. If the plant was left in the ground, the floret would continue maturing and explode into a beautiful abundance of yellow flowers before developing into seeds.