Sprouts and Sprouting

World > Food

At the Hippocrates Heath Institute, raw and living foods are the core of their program and sprouts make up 50 percent of the diet. The reason sprouts are a main focus of the Hippocrates program is because they contain a high level of nutrients and enzymes, which make them easy to assimilate by the body. This allows the body to direct newly discovered energy toward cleansing, regulating and building the immune system as well as creating healthy cells.

From Wikipedia:

Sprouts are said to be rich in digestible energy, bioavailable vitamins, minerals, amino acids, proteins, and phytochemicals, as these are necessary for a germinating plant to grow. These nutrients are essential for human health. The nutritional changes upon germination & sprouting are summarised below.

Chavan and Kadam (1989) concluded that:

"The desirable nutritional changes that occur during sprouting are mainly due to the breakdown of complex compounds into a more simple form, transformation into essential constituents and breakdown of nutritionally undesirable constituents."

"The metabolic activity of resting seeds increases as soon as they are hydrated during soaking. Complex biochemical changes occur during hydration and subsequent sprouting. The reserve chemical constituents, such as protein, starch and lipids, are broken down by enzymes into simple compounds that are used to make new compounds."

"Sprouting grains causes increased activities of hydrolytic enzymes, improvements in the contents of total proteins, fat, certain essential amino acids, total sugars, B-group vitamins, and a decrease in dry matter, starch and anti-nutrients. The increased contents of protein, fat, fibre and total ash are only apparent and attributable to the disappearance of starch. However, improvements in amino acid composition, B-group vitamins, sugars, protein and starch digestibilities, and decrease in phytates and protease inhibitors are the metabolic effects of the sprouting process."