Speaking of Sprouts

Sprouts. Today I wanted to talk to you about sprouts and their benefits to your diet. They are an amazing type of food and their benefits are great.

When you eat food there are quite a few things you are looking to get from it. Sprouts have pretty much all of these things. I was reading a couple of weeks ago that you could get all of your daily nutrients from 6 cups of sprouts (different types of course). This means everything you need. This is not to say that I recommend you give up your normal diet and only eat sprouts, it's just to give an illustration of how great sprouts are. Most people don't get enough of their daily nutrients at all.

A sprouted seed or grain is much higher in vitamins and minerals than the seed itself. When sprouting occurs, the seed/grain digests itself and releases all it's nutrients for growth. (FYI...I am not an expert, so I could be a little off. If you want to look into it you can check my good friend Google.) I do know that some sprouts have a vitamin content up to 500% more than the full grown version. No I didn't accidentally get an extra 0 in there. Most are at least 3-6 times higher.

As you probably already know, getting your nutrients in live form is way healthier for you than a supplement. When you are eating live foods it gives you chlorophyll, and enzymes that clear your body of the toxins it produces. Sprouts are extremely easy to digest because the plant has already done the work for you. They also contain high concentrations of RNA, DNA, protien and essential nutrients which you can only get from living cells. It seems that because of this, sprouts may be a little tiny fountain of youth =).

Here is another awesome thing about sprouts, they grow in any climate at any time of year and only take a couple of days from start to harvest. AND...they actually grow further in nutrients after harvest as opposed to other fruits and vegetables that start losing nutrients as soon as they are picked.

In the future (read- when I get my rear in gear and take some pictures of the process from start to finish), I will post on the process of sprouting at home. I just might start that tonight. In the mean time, you should check out the benefits of sprouts for yourself. Just go and Google health benefits of sprouts or something like that. You will be amazed at what you find.

How do you use them? You can just add them in to your other foods. My favorite is to LOAD them up on my sandwiches instead of lettuce. They taste awesome (in my opinion) and they are wonderful for you. My current favorite is a sandwich with avocado, tomato, broccoli sprouts, and alfalfa sprouts on a wrap (Ezekiel 4:9 wraps are really good or just some form of whole grain tortilla) and add a little mayo and Goulden's mustard. You won't be sorry you tried that my friend. If you want to skip out on the mayo it's still great with a little olive oil and red wine vinegar. I like to shake things up a bit sometimes.

Now get to sprouting!

On an update note, I was doing very well with my healthy eating and my energy levels were higher than I can remember them being in years. This is just from a few weeks of healthy improvements starting back at the end of January. Due to Curly's birthday, I ate some irregular food like cupcakes and sugar laden things, as well as going out to eat at Red Robin. I am now sick...pretty darn sick. I would say they are related because before we changed our eating habits we were sick quite a few times as well. I think that had we made it farther before having a birthday set back it wouldn't have made a very big difference, but since we are early in our journey of changing our eating habits our bodies are still getting rid of many years of bad eating toxins.