Are sprouts the same as bean sprouts? Debunking the first sprout myth

Most people, when they hear sprouts, picture an elementary school science class: placing one mung bean after another on a paper towel, watering them carefully, and after a few days they sprout into mung bean sprouts. In fact, bean sprouts are just one kind of sprout, but sprouts are by no means limited to bean sprouts.

Sprouts are not only bean sprouts; they are the smallest unit of a vegetable after the seed germinates.

"Sprouts" are the edible vegetable form that appears after a vegetable seed germinates; in other words, sprouts are the little babies of the vegetables we eat at our tables. Although at the sprout stage every kind of sprout looks much the same and is hard to tell apart, which leads most people to assume that "sprouts" is simply short for "bean sprouts," in reality there are very many kinds of edible sprouts. Common sprouts include not only beans, such as mung bean and soybean, that germinate into bean sprouts, but also, classified by the mature vegetable they grow into, the following categories: grains such as wheat and barley; leafy vegetables such as radish and water spinach; and others such as broccoli, red cabbage, buckwheat and sesame.

Tiny sprouts, abundant nutrition

Although sprouts are only the infant stage of a plant, their nutrition and enzymes far exceed those of the mature vegetable. At the stage when a plant seed germinates, it needs only water; all other nutrients come from inside the seed. During germination, the large-molecule nutrients originally stored in the seed, such as protein, lipids and starch, are converted through enzyme action into small-molecule forms that life can use directly, such as amino acids, fatty acids and simple sugars; these small-molecule nutrients are in a form that the human body can easily digest and absorb.

Sprouts, a source of complete enzymes in nature

Enzymes in nature can be divided into two kinds: synthesizing and decomposing enzymes. The high-enzyme fruits we often hear about sometimes contain only one of these, for example pineapple enzyme, which is a "decomposing" enzyme; sprouts, however, contain both "synthesizing and decomposing" enzymes, which is quite rare. Both kinds of enzymes inside the sprout help it break down the large-molecule nutrients in the seed into small molecules and, as it grows taller and stronger, synthesize these nutrients into absorbable forms. So when people eat sprouts, they can take in high concentrations of nutrients, both kinds of enzymes and phytonutrients. Take broccoli sprouts as an example: it is the young seedling of the broccoli we commonly eat, and the precious anti-cancer substance it contains, sulforaphane, is 20-50 times that of the mature broccoli. The nutritional and health value of a tiny sprout can be said to far exceed that of the grown vegetable.

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