Nutrition
Sprouts can be germinated at home or produced industrially. They are a prominent ingredient of a
raw food diet and are common in Eastern Asian cuisine.
Sprouting, like cooking, reduces anti-nutritional compounds in raw
legumes. Raw
lentils, for example, contain
lectins, anti-nutritional proteins which can be reduced by sprouting or cooking. Sprouting is also applied on a large scale to
barley as a part of the
malting process. A downside to consuming raw sprouts is that the process of germinating seeds can also be conducive to harmful bacterial growth.
Sprouts used for a
verrine.
Mung bean sprouts in a bowl that have been bleached, dramatically reducing their nutritional content as is typical with store bought mung bean sprouts. See above for unbleached, natural green/white mung bean sprouts.
Sprouts are rich in digestible energy, vitamins, minerals,
amino acids, proteins, and
phytochemicals, as these are necessary for a germinating plant to grow.
[8][9][10][11] These nutrients are also essential to human health.
The nutritional changes upon germination and sprouting are summarized below.
Chavan and Kadam (1989)
[12] 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. This is a reason why sprouts are also called pre-digested foods [13]"
- "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."
Increases in protein quality
Chavan and Kadam (1989) stated that:
[12]
Very complex qualitative changes are reported to occur during soaking and sprouting of seeds. The conversion of storage proteins of cereal grains into albumins and globulins during sprouting may improve the quality of cereal proteins. Many studies have shown an increase in the content of the amino acid Lysine with sprouting.
An increase in proteolytic activity during sprouting is desirable for nutritional improvement of cereals because it leads to hydrolysis of prolamins and the liberated amino acids such as glutamic and proline are converted to limiting amino acids such as lysine.
[12]
Here is a more logical link.
Sprouting or Germinating Seeds for Your Birds | Beauty of Birds
- Germination offers an easy, clean and safe way to provide superior nutrition to your birds. Simply soak the seeds to the point where the root tips show and feed to your birds ....
- Process: Soak a daily portion of seeds, grains and legumes ("Sprouts") in pure, clean water overnight. If you keep the seeds at room temperature (on the counter, for example), the seeds start germinating after 12 hours. If you keep the soaking seeds in the fridge, it will take around 24 hours to germinate). Germination is safer as the process is shorter and the seeds or grains don’t have time to deteriorate - and yet, germinated seeds also offer superior "living" nutrition similar to sprouts.... Note: only germinate one portion at a time.
It all goes against what Carolyn Tielfan would like to convince you.