INTRODUCTION: BACK TO THE SEED
FOR THE LAST twenty years, I have been searching for the bperfect food. I started as a fast-food- and meat-eater raised on the Standard American Diet on the streets of New York City. I understood early on that vegetables were good for you, yet I ate candy, pizza, pasta, hamburgers, milkshakes, cheese, ribs, and, of course, fried chicken. The less healthy the food was, the more I was attracted to it. After three different high schools, spray-painting graffiti on hundreds of subway trains, and causing all kinds of ruckus, I joined the U.S. Army’s Eighty-Second Airborne Division as the lowest-ranking enlisted soldier to jump out of planes and run through the woods. The army was a turning point in my life, because it taught me discipline and built my confidence, two traits that would serve me well in taking control of my life and my health. After the army, I turned my passion for street art into one of the first digital printing and graphic design studios. I developed an obsession for technology and went on to work with Paul Rand and Apple, Microsoft, and Adobe Systems.
Then my life changed forever when I watched my mother die of cancer at sixty-six and then my father die at age seventy-seven of heart disease in the same hospital. My mother’s sister had died from cancer, and her husband died of heart disease. Her brother died of heart disease, and his wife died of complications from diabetes. And my older brother became morbidly obese, developed type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and atrial fibrillation, and had the first of three strokes.
At age twenty-nine, I really thought my life was doomed. That I was dealt a bad hand of genes and I should get my affairs in order. Thank goddess, a random (nothing is really random) event introduced me to my first vegan friend, Denise Mari, at 2:00 a.m. in a New York City nightclub. I literally went from eating anything to exclusively eating raw fruits and vegetables within the space of two weeks.
I began to see the world in a completely different way. It was like when I was in second grade and I put on my glasses for the first time. Suddenly, everything was clear. Until I took one of those eye chart tests, I thought that I could see like everybody else. As I watched the other kids see all the smallest letters and numbers, I could see that even with my best squinting, I was outmatched. As I sat in the optometrist’s chair and watched the various lenses being flipped, the chart kept getting clearer and clearer. Occasionally, it would get worse and I would squelch, and then I would get closer to divine perfection. The world was getting clear to me. Still, I hated my glasses. I feared being called four eyes. While walking down a single New York City block, I put my glasses on and took them off at least a dozen times, and after that, I didn’t wear my glasses outside of the house for several years.
The relevance of that little story is that I knew that the glasses were good for me, but I let my aversion to them interfere with seeing perfectly, getting good grades, and even playing sports well. At Little League baseball, a ball literally hit me in the face because I couldn’t see it coming.
That’s the way it was for me with food, until my “cold cucumber” transformation. This was back in 1999 when the concept was almost unheard of. I quickly fell in love with nature. My entire world opened up. Losing weight literally and figuratively made me feel light and high on life. My chronic stuffy and bloody noses were gone, my crusty eyes were clear, and I could breathe clearly through both nostrils at the same time. My lower back pain was gone for good. It felt like a miracle. The challenge was what to eat, in what quantity, and where I was going to get it. Those were legitimate concerns, but I was focused, resourceful, and determined.
Every day, it became a little easier. I became familiar with how to adapt a menu in my local restaurants to accommodate me. I found foods that tasted good, filled me up, and digested well. Along the way, I experimented with some extreme forms of the diet. I ate mono fruitarian for a while. This meant eating exclusively fruit, one type at a time, until I was no longer hungry and then waiting a few hours until I was hungry and finding another fruit. It was fun, satisfying, and very effective. I loved it, and if I had lived in Bali or Hawaii, it would have been easy, but in my heart, I didn’t feel it was necessary. Adding salads, vegetables, seaweeds, seeds, and nuts made it so much easier, and that became my inspiration behind the launch of my first plant-based business.
Armed with the knowledge that 90 percent of Americans weren’t getting enough vegetables, in 2002, I invested in and cofounded (with Denise Mari) Organic Avenue, the first major organic cold-pressed juice and raw food retailer in the United States. We started the company in my loft in Chinatown, opened twelve stores across Manhattan, and grew more than 100 percent a year for ten years, until the sale of the company in 2012 to a private equity group. The goal of my next venture, Juicero, was to make a product that would enable people to load up on fresh, ripe, organic produce in an easily deliverable form. Five years, nine food scientists, twelve Ph.D.s, and fifty engineers later and the first at-home, cold-pressed juicing system was launched. By most measurements, Juicero was successful. We sold thousands of machines and more than a million Juicero packs, and the average Juicero user was consuming more than nine servings per week. But the company was sold to an investor group before hitting critical mass. After Juicero, I thought about what could serve the world better, and at a fraction of the cost. The answer was something I have been obsessively eating for the past two decades: sprouts! Everyone is looking for the fountain of youth. Some people spend up to a thousand dollars a day to stay at spas and retreat centers so they can get nourished with green drinks and plant-based cuisine, or they can do it at home, starting with sprouts. Sprouts are a nutrition revolution for everyone.
From Garnish to the Center of the Plate
In 1997, researchers at Johns Hopkins University discovered that broccoli sprouts contain astounding levels of cancer-protective chemicals. These chemicals, called isothiocyanates, make broccoli sprouts anywhere from thirty to fifty times more potent than mature broccoli. Since the discovery of the humble seed’s potential, broccoli sprouts have reached superstardom in health-conscious circles, but most people in this country don’t even know of their existence. Broccoli sprouts are still a niche of a niche, with far less than 1 percent of the U.S. population enjoying them on a regular basis.
Still, there is no shortage of great information about broccoli sprouts, but not so much for other sprouts. I believe that each living plant has something to teach us, and each sprout has its own story to tell. If as much money as went into researching broccoli sprouts went into a few other sprouts, I believe we would be amazed. But what we do know about sprouts is truly astounding, and without a doubt, there is no sustainable food on earth more nutritious than sprouts.
Sprouting brings new life to food, adding flavors and textures while packing in vitamins, micronutrients, phytonutrients, minerals, flavonoids, polyphenols, antioxidants, prebiotics, probiotics, and more. Sprouts are super low in calories (zero points on the Weight Watchers system!), low glycemic, and high in fiber and protein. Sprouting increases protein by as much as 20 percent and vitamins and other nutrients by up to 500 percent, making sprouts a healthier, unprocessed alternative to chalky, processed protein powders. Sprouting reduces phytic acid and lectins, substances found in beans and grains that can make them hard to digest. When beans and grains are sprouted, many people who gave them up are newly able to eat them. Sprouts are low in calories and high in everything that’s good for us. We’ve all heard about Captain Cook’s strategy of bringing citrus on board long sea voyages to keep his sailors from getting scurvy. What’s even more interesting to me was learning that he also initiated a continuous program of growing and eating sprouts that was key to keeping the sailors well fed with vitamin C and avoiding death by scurvy.
For all intents and purposes, if you ate sprouts for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and a snack, you would barely get eight hundred calories into your system (and feel full) but the equivalent of three thousand to four thousand calories of nutrition relative to other foods. For example, my Super Green Sprout Smoothie (here) provides more nutrition from vitamins, minerals, and phytonutrients than many people get in a week! Sprouts fit in with popular diets, including Bulletproof, Keto, Atkins, Paleo, and more. Sprouting takes us back to the seed with an invitation to achieve our greatest health potential. The Sprout Book shares all that I’ve learned and gained from this superfood in one place.
You can safely make sprouts at home in two to seven days without specialized equipment. If you’ve heard scary stories about contaminated sprouts, not to worry. Sprouting is easy: You simply add water, then wait for nature’s magical transformation from bean, grain, or seed to sprout. I will cover how much water to add, when to add, when to rinse, and when to refrigerate your sprouts to easily eliminate any chance of contamination.
Thanks to the increasing variety of sprouts available in natural food stores and supermarkets, it’s easy to start a sprouting habit without going DIY. I’ll share with you the best places to shop for sprouts, such as farmers’ markets and natural food stores with a good turnover, and what to look for in terms of quality and freshness. In the span of my career, I’ve worked with produce production facilities from 400 to 111,000 square feet, and I am extremely experienced in properly handling fresh raw produce, including sprouts. I’ll share from my experience how to shop for sprouts and provide my formula for cleaning sprouts so you can go forth and sprout safely and abundantly.
The goal of The Sprout Book is not only to nourish your body with this amazing plant food but to make magic in your kitchen. Sprouts add excitement to meals: adzuki, alfalfa, broccoli, buckwheat, cabbage, chia, chickpeas, clover, fenugreek, green pea, lentil, mung, mustard, onion, radish, sunflower … all these can be sprouted and offer up crisp, crunchy textures and tastes ranging from nutty to hardy, hot, crisp, powerful, sweet, and spicy. My goal with the recipes is to elevate sprouts from a garnish to the center of the plate and a catalyst for a radical shift in wellness.
Every recipe in the book is made up of a large percentage of sprouts. The rest will be raw vegetables, fruits, nuts, seeds, spices, sea vegetables, and top-quality oils. From takes on Indian street food to energizing green pea gazpacho, sophisticated lentil sprout pâté, and game-changing hummus, the recipes will blow your mind with flavor. All are simple to make, and none require a dehydrator, the stumbling block to many attempts at a raw food diet. You will learn that sprouts are a perfect food for training and that including sprout-based beverages can fuel your body with a plethora of macronutrients and micronutrients without the added sugar and artificial ingredients commonly found in sports drinks.
As you eat more sprouts as part of a plant-based diet, you will find yourself craving the pure burst of energy that a sprout smoothie, sprout salad, or a simple handful of sprouts delivers. You can expect to lose or maintain your weight while taking in more nutrition than ever, gaining energy, reducing inflammation, sleeping better, becoming more regular, and thinking more clearly. You can even tailor your sprout eating to supplement particular nutrients or target specific health conditions. This raw, living, plant-based way of eating is a deliciously low-cost, accessible way to heal the world, one seed at a time.
DR. DEAN ORNISH: “SPROUTS HAVE BENEFITS BEYOND THE NUTRIENTS THEY PROVIDE”
Dean Ornish, M.D., is the founder and president of the Preventive Medicine Research Institute and a leading expert on preventing and reversing heart disease with dietary and lifestyle changes including a whole-foods, plant-based diet. He has been a physician consultant to former president Bill Clinton and was appointed by former president Barack Obama to the Advisory Group on Prevention, Health Promotion, and Integrative and Public Health. He has written multiple bestsellers, including the classic Dr. Dean Ornish’s Program for Reversing Heart Disease.
How can sprouts play a role in supporting a healthy lifestyle?
Sprouts have a germinative energy that we don’t yet have the capacity in science to measure, but I believe this energy is one of the reasons seeds and nuts in general have been shown to be so powerful in preventing and treating so many diseases. Like seeds and nuts, sprouts, by nature, are designed to burst into a plant, and as such, they have benefits above and beyond the nutrients they provide.
What are some of the standouts in terms of nutritional value?
We all know that if you eat broccoli, it’s great. If you eat broccoli sprouts, it’s even better. A 2011 study from the University of Illinois found that combining broccoli with broccoli sprouts actually might increase the anticancer effects that each has on its own. A team at Johns Hopkins found that a daily serving of broccoli sprouts for two months reduced the marker for the presence of H. pylori, the bacteria that can lead to ulcers and gastritis, by 40 percent.
Do you think it’s feasible for patients to adopt a sprouting lifestyle?
In and of themselves, sprouts are relatively inexpensive, and most of the time it takes them to sprout is not supervised time, so to the extent that people can incorporate sprouting into a busy life, it’s to everyone’s advantage. And of course, you have the option of buying them at the grocery store.
Can sprouts be useful in food deserts?
Back in 2000, I worked with the CEO of McDonald’s to put salads on the menu. McDonald’s has millions of customers a day, and many of them live in food deserts where there are no grocery stores. The idea was that putting a healthy item on the menu would give people a choice. But what I hadn’t realized was that the salad would be priced at $5.99 while the burger was 99 cents. So if you were on a fixed income, you’d get more calories for your dollar by eating junk food, though of course it doesn’t factor in the real cost of the food in terms of subsequent health care. Sprouting could offer an affordable source of produce to food deserts.
How do sprouts compare with vitamin supplements?
A number of studies have shown that vitamins don’t necessarily decrease the risk for chronic disease, and in some cases, they even increase it. For example, studies show that when vitamin A was given to smokers, it actually increased their risk of lung cancer. Whereas when you get your nutrients from food, there are almost uniformly beneficial effects. With that food, you are also getting literally tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of other protective substances, such as phytochemicals, bioflavonoids, carotenoids, retinoids, and isoflavones to help reduce the risk of many chronic diseases. Sprouting can only make those effects more beneficial. So with few exceptions, it’s always better to get your nutrition the way it comes in nature rather than through a pill.
Copyright © 2020 by Doug Evans
Foreword copyright © 2020 by Joel Fuhrman
