Try Sprouts for a Healthy and Balanced Digestion

Sprouts, they seem so fragile and just another funny health food. But these little young stems have stored an incredible number of powerful nutrients and enzymes.

You see, seeds are meant to provide the plant-growing-embryo with all the nutrients it will need during the first crucial days of its development. A tiny seed is a store house of nutrients in a dormant state until they are needed for the sprouting process.

When water is absorbed, a great deal of enzymes are activated so that the nutrients can become available to the plant embryo which starts to grow. This process reaches its peak during the 3rd to 5th day of sprouting.

Sprouts are then full of valuable activated nutrients and enzymes. For example, a sprouted mung bean has:

• The carbohydrate content of a melon
• The amount of vitamin A of lemon
• The amount of vitamin B1 of an avocado
• The amount of vitamin B2 of a dry apple
• The amount of vitamin B3 of a banana
• The amount of vitamin C of a loganberry

But it's not just the nutrients. The enzymes you can find in sprouts are of immense biological importance, too. This is because they contribute to the digestion of other foods in our gut.

It may sound a paradox, but a sprout can do a lot more for you than you might think.

Insufficient digestion is the source of many health problems.

As we age, the amount of enzymes our body produces drops significantly. After our 20's, this ability drops 13% every ten years. This means that our digestive capacity lessens as well.

We are not able to properly digest the amount of food we used to... but it is extremely rare to see the amount of food consumed being reduced. On the contrary, overeating is a common pattern we see establishing itself as people get older.

Poorly digested food in the gut is an immediate source of bacterial infection. Harmful bacteria get the chance to overgrow, reproduce quickly and produce toxins, thus the delicate good bacterial balance is lost and our gut is inflamed.

This can have devastating effects in the actual amount of nutrients absorbed, but it can cause an even more serious disruption of the intestinal function.

The inflammation causes the surface of the gut to be disrupted. This means that toxins and undigested food particles can now leak to the blood stream and migrate anywhere in the body causing systemic (and completely irrelevant to the digestion itself) problems.

So a simple imbalance in the amount of food consumed and the actual amount we can process can indeed be the source of numerous problems.

It is really challenging for a physician to diagnose the real cause behind these pathological conditions. The solution is to switch to a diet that works in harmony with our gut. You can see now how important the sprouts can be.

Raw fruit and vegetables are rich in nutrients and enzymes. But sprouted beans and seeds though have 10-100 times more enzymes and nutrients than raw fruit and plants. It can make a huge difference, if they are included in your diet.

The best sprouts to incorporate in your diet are the following:

• Mung beans
• Rye
• Wheat
• Alfa alfa
• Lentils

Guest Author for this post: Helen Davies, MSc is a medical researcher, and graduate from Imperial College London ( MSc in Human Molecular Genetics). As the founder of Primal Health company, her expertise focuses on Nutritional Genomics and Functional Medicine. If you are interested in learning more about food & DNA interactions, visit our website --> http://www.Primal-Health.com