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SPROUTING SCIENCE

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Learn why scientists recommend sprouting as a valuable addition to your physical and mental wellbeing. We've read the studies and created a summary of the most valuable aspects of sprouting, but if you're still skeptical, read the original sources!

Anyone Can Sprout!

Seeding plants have evolved to respond to a number of environmental indicators, such as light, temperature, and the presence of water before beginning to sprout. This ensures that, should a seed begin to expend its resources on germinating, the plant in question will have the highest likelihood of survival, allowing for further dispersal of seeds once the plant has reached maturity (1). This evolutionary adaptation is exactly what allows sprouting to be a near-effortless endeavor, requiring little more than the temperature and light conditions of the average household kitchen, combined with the regular addition of a little water. Once the seeds have received the indicators that it is time to grow, the endosperm within it will supply all of the nutrients needed for it to sprout to a size where it can be readily consumed however best suits your palate (2)! Where gardening requires significant outdoor space, the absence of pests and rapid temperature change, and a bit of luck, sprouting requires no more space than a small jar on your countertop, and the very conditions you use to keep yourself comfortable at home year-round, and you will have delicious, nutritious sprouts every time (though you may still want to keep your sprouts away from hungry house pets)!

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Put simply, there is no barrier to entry for sprouting, and even first-time users of our sprouting kit will come to find how effortless the process is, and how great the reward!

Better Than the Real Thing!

While it might seem counterintuitive, there are vast bodies of research detailing how vegetable and legume sprouts boast both a greater nutritional profile and cost-efficacy than their adult-plant counterparts. Adult cruciferous vegetables (a wide variety of vegetables likely to be found in your fridge right now) including broccoli, radish, cabbage, cauliflower, etc. have been found to contain concentrations of immunity boosting phytochemicals anywhere from two to eleven times less than that of their sprouts, with longer germination periods, between 7-11 days, proving to significantly increase concentrations of a majority of these phytochemicals (3). The nutritional advantages don’t end there, as macronutrient profiles of sprouts have shown them to play a valuable role in contributing to one's daily needs, with 100g of our fully grown sprouts (from our alfalfa, clover, broccoli, and radish seed mix) will provide a rich macronutrient profile of approximately 3 grams of protein, 1 gram of fats, (0 grams of which are detrimental trans fats), 3 grams of carbohydrates, 2 grams of fiber, and less than 1 gram of sugar, all for approximately 30 calories (4).

Low Cost, Long Lasting!

Seeing the impact that rising grocery store and gas prices have had on our communities, it devastates us that it is becoming increasingly difficult to justify buying and eating healthy foods. We too would hesitate to recommend sprouting to the average person if it didn’t play a valuable role in reducing the grocery store burden. Sprouting saves time, money, and stress while providing significantly greater value per dollar spent when compared to shopping for vegetables. Don’t believe me? Let’s use broccoli as an example:

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Though researching sprouting hauls on any website will likely tell you the same, having become an avid sprouter in the last year, I have seen the results with my own eyes. Just two tablespoons of seeds, or approximately 20g, can very easily result in over 100g of sprouts that can contribute to a week or longer of nutrition. With 500g of our seeds costing approximately 15$, over the course of this singular sprouting journey you will grow approximately 2.5kg of edible sprouts! On the contrary, 1kg of fresh broccoli will often run you 10$, so you end up paying more for less both in actual quantity, as well as nutrition! Not to mention, seed longevity vastly outweighs freshly bought vegetables! We understand that life gets tough, and sometimes things get in the way of your plans, especially when it comes to cooking. Instead of scrambling to find a meal to suit the vegetables tucked in the long-forgotten corner of your fridge before they spoil, or worse, driving to the grocery store to buy one vegetable because the one you needed for today’s meal went bad, you can relax knowing that the bundle of seeds you purchased two months ago is still just as viable as the day you bought it, and may last upwards of three years, exhibiting no reductions in germination potential (5)! Research suggests that storing conditions of approximately 2 degrees Celsius will allow seeds to be stored near-indefinitely! The following list details the seed longevity of numerous sprout-worthy candidates, so you never have to stress about the seeds you may have forgotten about (6).

The Phytochemical Breakdown

We don’t just want to be one of those companies that throw buzz words at you. Rather, we want to make sure you know as much as we do so you can make an educated decision about whether or not sprouts are a smart investment for you (though we assure you that they are)! Phytochemicals are any of numerous bio-active chemicals present within plants, primarily serving to protect and aid in their growth. Studies have determined that these phytochemicals, when consumed by us, play a significant role in disease prevention, bolster our immune systems against allergens and sicknesses, aid our longevity through antioxidant activities, and provide a myriad of other benefits that we could use this whole page listing (7). If you incorporate the sprouts we currently offer into your diet, germinating for 5-8 days as mentioned earlier on this page, you will be consuming a wide range of phytochemicals that will not only make you feel better, but play a role in keeping you healthy longer!

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Here is a breakdown of just some of the phytochemicals that our sprouts offer, and the role they have in protecting you (some studies note slightly varied health benefits for the same compounds, however, they are still benefits!):

BROCCOLI

  • Flavonoids – Anticancer, reduced risk of degenerative disease

  • Phenolic acids – Anti-obesity, antiallergenic, reduction of metabolic disorder risk (8)

  • Lutein - Improves immunity, good for eye health

  • Lignin - Lowers the risk of cancer, reduces hot flashes in postmenopausal women, protects from cardiovascular diseases (7)

  • Organic acids – Antibacterial, antioxidant activites

  • Glucosinolates – Anticancer, anti-AGE, hypocholesterolemic, anti-obesity activities

  • Gallic, chlorogenic, sinapinic, benzoic, and ferulic acids, kaempferol – Anti-inflammatory, hypocholesterolemic, antioxidant activities (9)

ALFALFA

  • Saponins – Anticancer and antimicrobial activities

  • Flavonoids – Anti-inflammatory, antioxidant, antidiabetic activities

  • Phenolic Acids - Anti-inflammatory, antioxidant, antidiabetic activities

  • Vitamins C, E, and β-carotene – Antioxidant and anti-obesity activities

  • Trace Elements (copper, manganese, selenium) – Antidiabetic and antioxidant activities, enhanced functions of enzymes

  • Coumestrol – Anti-obesity (9)

CLOVER

  • Flavonoids - Anti-inflammatory, antioxidant, antidiabetic activities

  • Phenolic Acids – Anti-inflammatory, antioxidant, antidiabetic activities

  • Isoflavones – Anticancer, antioxidant activities, anti-inflammatory, ant-microbial activities (9, 11, & 12)

MUNG BEAN

  • Flavonoids - Anti-inflammatory, antioxidant, antidiabetic activities

  • Phenolic acids - Anti-inflammatory, antioxidant, antidiabetic activities

  • Isoflavones – Anticancer, antioxidant activities, anti-inflammatory, ant-microbial activities (13 & 9)

RADISH

  • Flavonoids – Anticancer, heart disease risk reduction

  • Phenolic Acids – Anti-diabetes, increased antioxidant capacity (8)

  • Glucosinolates – Anticancer, anti-AGE, hypocholesterolemic, anti-obesity activities

  • Isothiocyanates – Anticancer, anti-inflammatory, antioxidant activities, anti-diabetes, cardioprotective (10)

Calories: The energy your body needs to run its essential functions. Though the caloric energy requirements vary greatly depending on one’s activity, stature, etc., a near universal truth is that eating excess calories will result in weight gain, often in the form of body fat when rigorous muscle-growth training is not involved. Therefore, food types that maximize the nutrients your body receives while minimizing caloric intake increase the potential benefits your body can receive through consumption while helping not exceed daily caloric needs.

The Perfect Diet Food

Whether or not we’d like to admit it, many of us are looking to either lose weight or improve our diets, and the healthy habits that sprouting can help establish in conjunction with their health-value may play a valuable role in helping you achieve those goals. Sprouts are a low-calorie, high-flavor, addition to any meal that can add a nutritious boost with near-negligible calories to your diet. Because you can eat so many sprouts without adding a bevy of calories to your daily plan, sprouts can help stave off hunger by keeping you feeling full for longer! Adding raw sprouts atop sandwiches or salads, cooking them into your favorite meals, or simply grabbing a handful of sprouts as you pass through the kitchen can be a healthy way to curb hunger and develop healthy alternative to unhealthy eating practices, and can be a valued addition to any dietary plan, whether you intend to gain weight, lose weight, or simply add nutritional value to what you currently eat.

Fiber: Fiber is a form of carbohydrate that is unable to be digested by your body. This does not mean, however, that fiber is unimportant. Dietary fiber is essential to promoting proper gastrointestinal health and aids in one feeling satiated for longer after eating. Additionally, diets that are high in fiber contribute to a lower overall cholesterol, promoting long term well-being (14). Germinated sprouts have inherent fiber that provide all of these benefits, however, this benefit can further be boosted through the consumption of the seed-hulls post germination. The option to remove them is entirely up to you, as they have reported no inherent detriments, nor do they have a markedly unpleasant taste or texture.

Protein: The building blocks of muscle, eating a sufficient amount of protein daily ensures that your body will maintain or even grow the muscles essential for your body’s more arduous undertakings: arduous movement, sports, and maintaining heightened mobility with age. Whether you are aiming to gain weight, lose weight, or not particularly concerned with dieting at all, protein is paramount to your continued health and ability to be active in accordance with your current lifestyle. Additionally, protein leads to one of the highest degrees of satiation of any macronutrient, helping one remain full for longer, and staving off hunger.

Fats: Despite the nomenclature matching that which fitness buffs aim to avoid, the importance of fat as a macronutrient cannot be overstated. Fats are essential for the successful function of the vast majority of the body’s processes, including the uptake of fat-soluble micronutrients such as our essential vitamins that keep our bodies healthy and rid of disease (14). Trans fatty acids are widely considered to be the most detrimental form of fats to consume, followed by saturated, and finally unsaturated fats (15). Germinated sprouts have extremely low concentrations of saturated fats, and no detectible amounts of trans fatty acids. In this sense, germinated sprouts provide none of the detriments to heart and body health associated with trans fats, while leaving significant room in one’s personal diet to ensure they are consuming heart healthy fats throughout the day (16).

Carbohydrates: Perhaps the body’s most importance energy source, carbohydrates fuel the vast majority of bodily activity through the conversion and uptake of glucose and the secretion of insulin from the pancreas to provide energy to tissues for all functions (14). Slow digesting carbohydrates, or “complex carbs”, (such as those found in sprouts) ensure a steady release of insulin and stable levels of blood sugar throughout their digestive period, and are widely considered healthier due to the absence of the “crash” associated with faster digesting carbohydrates. This in turn, helps one feel energized and full for longer periods of time (17).

Sugar: Sugars are a form of carbohydrate (though not all carbohydrates are sugars) sometimes referred to as “simple carbohydrates” due to the relative simplicity for one’s body to break them down. This results in a rapid, large spike in blood sugar, high insulin response, and ultimately, that familiar carb crash later on in the day. As simple carbohydrates are often less nutritious, less filling, and more easily lead to cravings due to their high palatability, they are best minimized in one’s personal diet (18). Sprouts have very little if any sugars of note, and therefore boast the exact opposite of the detriments often provided by sugars.

Boost Your Mental Health

​As times have grown increasingly tough for many people, taking care of the garden of one’s mental health is of the utmost importance. It is here, too, that sprouting can make a positive impact on your wellbeing, with a long body of evidence touting the ritualistic, positive habit building, mood boosting benefits of growing one’s own food at home. Spending small portions of your time every day tending to your sprouts fosters not only a sense of ritual, but allows for a sense of achievement, as you will be working towards a goal while nurturing a living being, not to mention the reward that comes with being able to eat your freshly grown sprouts! Gardening in any form has been long linked to reductions in stress and anxiety, and has even been coopted into a form of “horticultural therapy”, wherein gardening-like activities have been shown to reduce pain, promote rehabilitation and recovery, help individuals cope with traumatic experiences, and instill a positive association with healthy eating habits (19). Additionally, in times of crisis, at-home growing has been linked to reductions in stress through reducing perceived and tangible food insecurity (20). Put simply, growing and nurturing the garden of your mental health can begin with growing and nurturing a garden in your home through sprouting!

Support Your Environment

As we care deeply about the local and global environment, wanting to ensure it remains both beautiful and viable to support diverse ecosystems and future generations of people like you, we are proud to recommend at-home sprouting as a direct means of supporting your environment. In many nations, modern food industries create a significant footprint, both in terms of greenhouse gases emitted through the growth, processing, and transport of goods, as well as the physical waste associated with packaging and its creation. Moreover, the purchasing habits of the modern consumer directly necessitate increased land use. This has led to untold deforestation in the last decade alone, releasing centuries of sequestered carbon through logging, dismantling habitats, and significantly impacting global biodiversity in the name of farming acreage. Sprouting can play a significant role in altering your habits as a modern consumer, reducing your personal carbon footprint and building habits to support a more sustainable future. Not only does sprouting at home encourage a reduction in meat consumption, one of the primary drivers of climate change, it decreases reliance on grocery store products and the need to drive to acquire them. Lessening one’s personal reliance on the grocery store both directly benefits your local environment through your actions and retracts your support of the transportation industries, monoculture farms and their practices (such as deforestation and rampant pesticide use), and can influence a nation’s reliance on these practices should enough people change their behavior (21). Sprouting can be the first step in fostering the change you wish to see in the world, and getting your friends and loved ones sprouting alongside you can have a cascading influence on your local environment!

The Minds Behind The Science (aka our sources)

  1. Santos, Jessyca Adelle Silva, and Queila Souza Garcia. “Ethylene in the Regulation of Seed Dormancy and Germination: Biodiversity Matters.” Science Direct, Laboratory of Plant Physiology, Department of Botany, Federal University of Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, Brazil, 19 Jan. 2023, www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B9780323858465000138.

  2. Editors of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. “Endosperm - Plant Tissue.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, inc., www.britannica.com/science/endosperm. Accessed 11 Dec. 2024.

  3. Baenas, Nieves, et al. “Broccoli and Radish Sprouts Are Safe and Rich in Bioactive Phytochemicals.” Postharvest Biology and Technology, Elsevier, 3 Feb. 2017, www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0925521416306317.

  4. Nutritionix. Nutritionix Food Database, Syndigo, www.nutritionix.com/. Accessed 11 Dec. 2024.

  5. Page-Mann, Petra. “How Long Do Seeds Last?” Cornell Small Farms, 21 Jan. 2020, smallfarms.cornell.edu/2020/01/how-long-do-seeds-last/.

  6. Growseed. “How Long Do Seeds Last.” Growseed, www.growseed.co.uk/how-long-do-seeds-last.html. Accessed 11 Dec. 2024.

  7. Kumar, Ashwani, et al. “Major Phytochemicals: Recent Advances in Health Benefits and Extraction Method.” Molecules (Basel, Switzerland), U.S. National Library of Medicine, 16 Jan. 2023, pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9862941/.

  8. Abellán, Ángel, et al. “Sorting out the Value of Cruciferous Sprouts as Sources of Bioactive Compounds for Nutrition and Health.” Nutrients, U.S. National Library of Medicine, 19 Feb. 2019, pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6412956/).

  9. Aloo, Simon, et al. “(PDF) Edible Plant Sprouts: Health Benefits, Trends, and Opportunities for Novel Exploration.” ResearchGate, Nutrients, Aug. 2021, www.researchgate.net/publication/354052309_Edible_Plant_Sprouts_Health_Benefits_Trends_and_Opportunities_for_Novel_Exploration.

  10. Olayanju, Julia B. B., et al. “A Comparative Review of Key Isothiocyanates and Their Health Benefits.” MDPI, Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute, 7 Mar. 2024, www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/16/6/757#:~:text=Similar%20to%20other%20isothiocyanates%2C%20SFN,19%2C20%2C21%5D.

  11. Yu, Jie, et al. “Isoflavones: Anti-Inflammatory Benefit and Possible Caveats.” Nutrients, U.S. National Library of Medicine, 10 June 2016, pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4924202/#:~:text=Isoflavones%20are%20a%20class%20of,the%20underlying%20mechanisms%20remain%20unclear.

  12. Chiriac, Elena Roxana, et al. “(PDF) Comparison of the Polyphenolic Profile of Medicago Sativa L. and Trifolium Pratense l. Sprouts in Different Germination Stages Using the UHPLC-Q Exactive Hybrid Quadrupole Orbitrap High-Resolution Mass Spectrometry.” ResearchGate, Molecules, May 2020, www.researchgate.net/publication/341466376_Comparison_of_the_Polyphenolic_Profile_of_Medicago_sativa_L_and_Trifolium_pratense_L_Sprouts_in_Different_Germination_Stages_Using_the_UHPLC-Q_Exactive_Hybrid_Quadrupole_Orbitrap_High-Resolution_Mass_.

  13. Hou, Dianzhi, et al. “(PDF) Mung Bean (Vigna Radiata L.): Bioactive Polyphenols, Polysaccharides, Peptides, and Health Benefits.” ResearchGate, Nutrients, May 2019, www.researchgate.net/publication/333523407_Mung_Bean_Vigna_radiata_L_Bioactive_Polyphenols_Polysaccharides_Peptides_and_Health_Benefits.

  14. Espinosa-Salas, Santiago. “Nutrition: Macronutrient Intake, Imbalances, and Interventions.” StatPearls [Internet]., U.S. National Library of Medicine, 8 Aug. 2023, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK594226/.

  15. Harvard School of Public Health. “Types of Fat.” The Nutrition Source, The President and Fellows of Harvard College, 7 Nov. 2024, nutritionsource.hsph.harvard.edu/what-should-you-eat/fats-and-cholesterol/types-of-fat/).

  16. Márton, M., et al. “Evaluation of Biological Value of Sprouts  I. Fat Content, Fatty Acid Composition.” Acta Univ. Sapientiae,  Alimentaria, 2010, acta.sapientia.ro/content/docs/evaluation-of-biological-value-of-sprouts-i-fat-content-fatty-acidcomposition-.pdf.

  17. Cray. “Carbohydrates and the Glycemic Index:   ‘Slow’ Carbs vs. ‘Fast’ Carbs.” Kansas Health System, Cray Diabetes Self-Management Center, www.kansashealthsystem.com/-/media/Files/PDF/Cray/Glycemic-Index.pdf. Accessed 11 Dec. 2024.

  18. Cleveland Clinic. “Carbohydrates: Getting the Most out of Fiber, Starches & Sugars.” Cleveland Clinic, 23 Aug. 2024, my.clevelandclinic.org/health/articles/15416-carbohydrates.

  19. Schmutz, Ulrich, et al. “(PDF) the Benefits of Gardening and Food Growing for Health and Wellbeing.” Garden Organic, The Tudor Trust, Apr. 2014, www.researchgate.net/publication/263117318_The_benefits_of_gardening_and_food_growing_for_health_and_wellbeing.

  20. Mead, Bethan R., et al. “Growing Your Own in Times of Crisis: The Role of Home Food Growing in Perceived Food Insecurity and Well-Being during the Early COVID-19 Lockdown.” Emerald Open Research, Emerald Insight, 13 Oct. 2021, www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/eor-06-2023-0009/full/html.

  21. Airgarden. “Growing Your Own Food: The Climate and Environmental Impact If Every Australian Household Joined In.” Airgarden, 2021, airgarden.com.au/blogs/news/growing-your-own-food-the-climate-and-environmental-impact-if-every-australian-household-joined-in.

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