How To Tap into the Power of the Planet's Most Nutritious Foods: Sprouts, Shoots, Microgreens & More With Doug Evans.

On this episode of the Ben Greenfield.

Fitness Podcast, I became my strongest version of myself. While consuming the sprouts. I had the energy explosive running in my high intensity. I said, I'm never going to buy vegetables in the grocery store again. It's actually pretty incredible to think about that. Every sprout has every single amino acid for every to form a protein.

Help. Performance, nutrition, longevity, ancestral living, biohacking, and much more. My name is Ben Greenfield. Welcome to the show. Well, well, well, folks. Gosh, it's been a while since I've discovered these things called sprouts. It's probably been like two years. This dude sent me a book about sprouts. And up until that point, I'd seen my wife messing around with them a little bit. I'd seen him as, like, these seemingly overpriced, tiny little plastic boxes of greens at the grocery store. But I hadn't really done a whole lot with sprouts. And then it was kind of like right when Covid struck and I was figuring out all these different things to do while I was bored, stuck at home, slash, attempting to prepare for the future by figuring out how to get nutritious food cheaper, less expensively, I suppose I should say, to be grammatically correct, I started messing around with sprouting. You know, everybody was at home stocking up on Twinkies and toilet paper. So I powered through this book. It was called the Sprout Book. Some guy randomly sent it to me. I don't know how he got my address, but he sent it to me and I read it, and it was actually really good. I'd never actually seen any books that were just like, fully devoted to sprouting. And so I ordered me some seeds, and they were dirt cheap. I found some on Amazon called Broccoli and Friends. They were broccoli and alfalfa and radish and clover. And I followed the rules in the book, which were specifically to use what are called high germination seeds. So that's what I did. I used high germination seeds and I began sprouting. And I had these two glass mason jars, and I put them in there for like, five days and. And they just were, like, coming out the butthole. These jars, they're everywhere, these sprouts. They honestly just took on a life of their own. And I started making sprouts, like, every couple weeks. Sometimes I put my sons to work and I'd have them go and change out the sprouts, kind of rinse them a little bit. And sometimes I Did it sometimes. My wife did it when I was traveling. But honestly, I kept them in the freezer and I would put them in smoothies, and I kept them in the refrigerator and put them on salads. And sometimes I'd just have sprouts instead of a salad. And I just got super duper into sprouting. So I really have been continuing to sprout for the past couple of years. And I really like it because, as my podcast guest today is going to explain to you, they aren't just like overpriced stuff that hippies buy at the grocery store. They actually got something going for them. And it turns out that my guest on today's podcast also is the guy who sent me that book. His name is Doug Evans, and Doug sent me the book. And so when I'd run into little issues when I was sprouting, I would always text Doug or email Doug and bug him and ask him little questions about my sprouts. You know, there's a little bit of like, you know, mold gonna kill me if they get mold, or, you know, what's the best water to use or how long do you do it for? What kind of seeds are best? And Doug just seemed to know everything that there was to know about sprouting. So perhaps he's like, he's like a verified hippie, where I'm just a fake hippie. You might be familiar with Doug's name because he was the guy who originally founded this called Juicero, which was like an automatic cold press juicer device. And since then, he's also been working behind the scenes on this new device related to sprouting. And perhaps we can talk a little bit about that on today's show. But what I want to really prioritize talking about on today's show is sprouts and how you can do it on your own at home. Because I'm serious, you guys, this is like dirt cheap. And you get amazing, amazing nutrient dense food for dirt cheap. It should be illegal. It's so cheap. Doug, welcome to the show, man.

Thank you so much for having me. Ben And I sent you the book because I think that you personify research, nutrition, athleticism, and communication. So you are like the first book I sent out.

You got four out of five. I'm not that athletic, but I can communicate and I love to explore new things. And I forget the other some ones that you said. So obviously short term memory wasn't on there, but thanks, man. I'm glad you sent me the book.

Well, look, I think A little bit of a backstory for me. I moved to the Mojave Desert about three and a half years ago, and I realized not only was I in the desert, I was in a food desert. And there was no health food stores, no restaurants near me. And the idea of growing a garden in the desert is daunting to begin with, but to grow it, to grow your food would take weeks or months or years to get edible and consumable food. So in deep reflection, while I'm soaking in the hot springs, looking at the Milky Way, thinking, I made a grave error moving to the desert. Unlike you, sprouting wasn't new to me. I had been sprouting for 22 years at the time, but it was never for food. It was never for meals. It was always as a garnish.

Right. That's the same way that I'd been familiar with sprouts in the past. And by the way, I want you to continue your story. But, I mean, I'm not really convinced that a desert is a food desert, per se, because if you go to a place like Sedona, it was obviously chocolate tree and Whole Foods and juice bars everywhere. You can't swing a dead cat by the tail without hitting one. So when you say you were in the desert, were you literally in a tent in the desert or something?

Yeah, I was in a tent. I was in a yurt, actually, in the Mojave Desert about an hour and 15 minutes east of Palm Springs. If someone wanted to get the visual when they took the mobile meth van in Breaking Bad out, that's, like, where I live.

Oh, wow. Okay. Yeah. So you were a legitimate desert. All right, well, go on. So now I understand why you started thinking about sprouts.

So I started to think about sprouts. Fast forward. Within a month, most of my calories were coming from sprouts that I was growing in six glass jars in about one cubic foot. So about the size of a milk crate, I was able to grow most of my nutrition. It literally blew my mind.

I believe you, because they've just taken a life of their own in my own pantry. And I'm probably going to interrupt your story as you go on, Doug. So I apologize if it's annoying, but I. If you were getting that percentage of your calories from sprouts, I think probably the first thing my audience is wondering is, what was your gas like? Or what'd your gut feel like? Because that's obviously like, you know, anybody who's tried to subsist on raw Vegetables knows that, you know, sometimes you feel pretty good, but you also fart like a cow.

Yeah, it's interesting. I think if you chew them well and if you stare at them before you eat them, you can start to prepare the digestive fluids.

I understand tip number one about chewing them well, because that applies to all foods, but what do you mean, stare at them?

Well, I think that digestion really begins with the eyes. Like Pavlov's dog, right? You ring the bell, he starts to salivate. If you stare at your food, you can tune in to the food, to the digestive fluids, and. And prepare the body to consume, digest, absorb, assimilate the food that you're eating.

I'd love to see a study on blindfolding people and seeing if it affects their digestive enzymes.

Well, maybe you could do a study where you get two people. One you tune in to staring at them, preparing for it, and the other will just inhale it like a dog. And then you could see what their fart levels are. Right?

Yeah. No, I do believe you because, like, I am at the point in my life now where, you know, I'm almost 40. I feel like I've gotten a lot of the nutrition stuff figured out and know my body pretty well. And even if I'm ravenously hungry, if I'm on my way to a meeting that I gotta drive to, or if I'm in a hurry, I will skip eating. Sometimes I'll have like a shot of ketone esters or a couple of scoops of amino acids or something that doesn't require digestion. But I would literally skip eating because I know inevitably, like, within a few hours, I'll get a little bit of a tummy ache or I'll see, like, bits of undigested food from that meal in my stool because it's shocking how much less efficient the body is at digesting when you're stressed, when you're eating in a hurry, or when you're not eating mindfully. So I get it.

Yeah. So to answer your question, hey, I was living by myself here in the tent in the desert. But I don't like the feeling of uncomfortability. So I know that kind of. With an audience of one, I was able to know if I just inhaled the sprouts, I could feel like I was pregnant. Like my stomach could be totally distended, and it was hard. Then if I took my time, I looked at the seeds, I looked at the sprouts, I chewed them. Well, it's just not an issue at all. For me. So I've developed, I think, the microbiome and I feel good about it.

You mean you think that your microbiome shifted in a manner that allowed you to digest plants more efficiently?

100%.

I know that that's actually been something that's been tested with a lot of these biome analyses, like Biome and Eubiome and Gut Bio. And a lot of these companies do show a shift in the microbiome, for better or worse, in people who eat a high carbohydrate diet. Often that shift, it's towards a bacterial profile of bacteria that rely upon carbohydrates as a really good source of fuel. And thus you wind up having more sugar cravings. And sometimes when you stop eating a lot of carbohydrates, it takes a while for that microbiome shift to get to the point where your bacteria aren't asking you 24, 7 to eat carbs. So that's definitely a thing. But the other thing that I think is probably important to point out here, kind of like the big elephant in the room, is sprouts really aren't like a lot of vegetables. You know, we have people like Stephen Gunner Hendry or Paul Saladino or a lot of these champions of either a low plant or a low lectin or a low plant defense mechanism diet, championing the idea that because plants don't have hooves or teeth or claws or nails etc, that they've developed their own plant defense mechanisms. You know, my audience is, you know, for the most part, pretty familiar with this story. Lectins and glutens and the like. And thus if you eat them, they tend to do some damage to the gut or cause digestive discomfort because those plant defense mechanisms haven't been deactivated. You know, thus the idea that while I, being gluten sensitive, avoid bread quite a bit unless I've got like a gluten digesting enzyme on hand, I'll eat my wife's slow fermented sourdough bread because it pre digests a lot of the gluten, lowers the glycemic index, makes it more digestible, et cetera. Something similar is going on with sprouts, right?

Absolutely. When you soak the seed or the grain, the soaking process initiates the germination process. And while you're germinating, you are removing the enzyme inhibitors and you're removing the phytic acid, and you're literally going through a metamorphosis from a dormant living organism, that grain or that seed into a vegetable. So it's the equivalent almost to, like, a butterfly from a worm and a caterpillar becoming a butterfly. So it's, it's a very big shift.

Now, just so that people understand exactly what you're saying and some of the terminology here because, because we, we kind of sort of skipped over this important part. But, you know, I, I, I had you get right into your story. What exactly is going on? When I, like, go to Amazon and I order, like, the, the broccoli and friends mix, or as I learned from your book, try to select a seed that's marked as a high germination seed because you get more of the little seeds turning into sprouts, a higher success rate, so to speak. Like human sperm, they're more fertile, these high germinators. So if I order those, they get to my house, there's these little bags of hard seeds. If I tried to eat them, they'd all wind up in my poop. There's some people, like Dr. Rhonda Patrick, who say, toss them in the freezer and then put them in a blender and blend them in your smoothie. And that concentrates the very beneficial sulforaphane content. And that's one way that you can consume them. But I've talked to a lot of people who've done that, and they still find these little seeds in their poop. So I don't know that just eating the seeds or blending the seeds is the best way to do things, thus sprouting. And so what's happening when I sprout? And if you'd like, if you want to kill two birds with one stone, just walk me through the whole sprouting process and explain what's happening in each step of the process. That might be a good way to explain this to people.

Sure. Well, you are a man of nature, so you understand nature more than most people. Basically, all nature wants to grow, spread its seed, and replicate. Not just humans. The ark. Is that a single seed? Let's just talk about a broccoli seed for a second. That one seed has the potential in it to grow into a broccoli plant. In normal nature, an insect or a mammal may consume the fruit of the broccoli. Broccoli will go and flower and then fruit and then have pods. And in those pods will be hundreds, thousands of seeds. Normally in nature, those seeds would be going through the digestive tract of an animal. And then in the course of the digestive process, the different acids in the nutritional process will actually remove the enzymes and then prepare that seed for germination, the animal takes a poop, it's on the soil, and then the seed will then sprout and the shoot will come out, the root will come out and it will grow. So it's really interesting that we can take a seed like that, broccoli seed, and simulate what happens in nature by adding water. So the first step is you take the seeds and you soak them. And there's. I wrote the sprout book because there's a lot of levels of specificity around how do you sprout each type of seed. But take the broccoli seed, you soak it for, say, five hours. And this is very simple. You take the seed, you get a vessel, and you soak it for five hours. After five hours, you take a strainer. It could be a cheesecloth, could be a metal screen, could be a colander. You strain off the extra water.

I used a metal screen, by the way, because it was super easy. You get the metal screens and they come with the jars. So that way you're not fussing around with too many things. You literally, like, already have the seeds in the jar. The strainer is on top of the jar, so you can just pour the water straight out. I think that the little screens on top of the jars are the best way to go.

Personally, they're easy. Alternatively, you could use cheesecloth and a rubber band. You could use a sock, you could use a shirt. The seeds. I've washed the apparatuses in my sink and a seed will end up in a sponge. And if I come back from a weekend, the seed will sprout inside the sponge. They'll be sprouting out of the drain, so they want to grow. So if you soak them for that eight hours, five hours, then you strain off the extra water. You then rinse them again, and then you invert the jar so that the extra water can drain itself out and there could still be airflow going into the jar. So I have so many sprout jars going, I leave them at a 45 degree angle on my dish tray, on my dish rack. But you could have all sorts of stands or different apparatuses in order to correct the right angle. So airflow can go in and water can go out.

Yeah. And I started, by the way, I started dirt cheap because I didn't want to buy a bunch of stuff before I figured out if it was for me. So I didn't even start with the little. With the little, you know, mesh screens for the top of the jar. I didn't have the little stands. That automatically means $10 plastic stands from Amazon that'll automatically kind of put it at a 45 degree angle when I put it in the pantry. Like a lot of this stuff, once I figured out, okay, I like sprouts, they agree with my digestive system. This is cheap and it's giving me tons of nutrient density versus buying the same thing for 15 bucks from the grocery store. I stocked up on some of this stuff from Amazon. But yeah, I mean, the right supplies seem to make this way easier. And if you guys go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com sproutspodcast By the way, I'll just link to some of the cheapo stuff I got off Amazon to make the sprouting easier. But yeah, like the mesh screens in the stand. So when you say 45 degree angle, I want to make sure people know, like, you don't have to get out at a protractor or a bubble level or something like that. You can literally just get these plastic stands on Amazon. It'll automatically put them at 45 degrees when you, you know, when you invert your jars and start sprouting.

Ben, I'm going to digress for one second. Go back to the digestive process. So if you think about hay that they're feeding to horses, that hay is predominantly alfalfa. And you think about the roughage and how dry that is. And if you can imagine attempting, you know, even with your teeth, trying to chew that and digest that, you'd have some problems with it. Yet alfalfa sprouts are the most tender, soluble and insoluble fiber that break down and get digested so easily. You start with a seed that looks like a poppy seed. Within a few days, you have a vegetable that is tender. And that same vegetable, if it grows, will grow into alfalfa hay. But the digestive properties of these tender vegetables is very easy. I just want to go back to that. That's the same thing. If you look at the broccoli floret that may have taken six months to grow, and you look at the, the stalk on it and the stem, that's hard to digest, that's a lot of roughage in it. The broccoli sprout is all tender and very easy. If you put a few chews into it, you will break that down and you'll be feeding the microbiome and you'd be feeding the colon, and you'll sweep the colon and you'll be able to extract the nutrients that are contained within the cytoplasm within the cells of those sprouts.

Yeah. And by the way, like I mentioned when I tried, for example, Dr. Rhonda Patrick's trick, she's just so lazy. She doesn't sprout them. She puts the seeds in the freezer and then blends them with the idea that when you freeze and blenn, and she's got all sorts of videos about this on the Internet, that it will allow you to get a lot more of this isothiocyanate called sulforaphane, which is a really great. Primarily it's a phytochemical and it's an anti carcinogenic compound. It's very good. It's extremely concentrated in sprouts. It's been shown to slow tumor growth and protect DNA and reduce inflammation and neutralize toxins. But I can tell you that when I tried that trick and I put the seeds in the freezer and then just would like, you know, take the seeds and toss them into the blender, thinking I'd be able to just skip the whole sprouting process. You know, seeds galore in my stool and I don't think I've ever found a sprout in my stool. So I mean, the absorptability, there's definitely something going on, at least in Ben Greenfield's poopy system.

Yeah, I think you should really post your stool cam so you could share that with your listeners.

That's not going to happen.

Okay. But at any rate, I think when it comes to the sprouting in particular about broccoli sprouts having sulforaphane and all cruciferous vegetables have the sulforaphane. I think that sprouting them and consuming them on day three or day five. And basically the sprouts don't have the broccoli sprouts don't have the sulforaphane. The sulforaphane is a byproduct of, of the glucosinolate, the glucoraphanin. And then when you chew it, break it, crush it, or as you described before, freeze it, you then encounter the enzyme that's also in there, the myrosinase. And the combination of the glucoraphanin and the myrosinase forms the sulforaphane, which is very quick acting. It does not last very long. It's perfect for when you chew it, when you blend it and when you consume it.

And you'll get the same thing when you chew or when you blend your sprouts, you'll still get the sulforaphane. Based on that activation of the chewing or the blending or the masticating process. You're still getting sulforaphane from sprouts as you would also from seeds, right?

Yeah, I mean, the seed. The interesting thing is as. And we're really like cutting hairs here because the difference between the seed and day three of a sprout is diminimous relative to the difference between a seed and a mature broccoli stalk. Right? So if you're anywhere in the first three days, five days, seven days, you're getting a potent concentration of the sulforaphane from the sprouts. So I look at the digestibility of the tender vegetables a lot more than the seed. I mean, you could break a tooth. You could break a tooth trying to chew on a seed. I think that people try to hack everything. I just go through the process, soak the seeds, grow the sprouts, this process back to the sprouting. You rinse them after the first time, and then you rinse them twice a day. You strain them and they just grow on their own, the seeds. It's harder to screw it up than it is to do it right? I mean, realistically, all you need to do is make sure they're getting appropriate level of moisture and then you're rinsing them off and they will grow. That's it. People ask me constantly on Instagram, Ugevans are asking me, well, what's the best way to store the sprouts? And you can store them in the refrigerator, right? You want to get off any extra moisture you can storm in the refrigerator, you can freeze them. If I am really going away and I have extra broccoli sprouts, I will stuff them into ice cube trays and add a little bit of water. So then I can have pre made, pre dosed broccoli sprouts in the freezer because they will store there. But for the most part, my recommendation is for the extra couple dollars, get another jar going and constantly have rotation so that you could be harvesting fresh vegetables every day and not have to store them.

And I like to store them in the freezer. It's perfect. When you store them in the refrigerator, you probably know a lot better than I do, Doug. But for me, it seems like about three or four days and they start to get a little bit slimy and I start to get concerned about mold, histamines, etc. So I like to store them in the freezer. And of course, the only problem with that is you can't take them out of the freezer and thaw them out, at least in my own experience, and have them be that great for a salad or recipe or something like that. The freezer ones seem to just work best for really a smoothie, unless you know some trick that I don't know. Am I correct?

Dr. No. Basically, when you freeze them, you're breaking down the cell walls, which is actually what you were describing before, which is actually triggering the creation of the sulforaphane. Because once the cell walls are breaking down, the glucoraphanin is mixing with myrosinase. I just think that it's easy enough to have many jars going. So I'm going to go back to the story for a second because I think it's really relevant. All of a sudden, I went from sprouting alfalfa sprouts and mung bean sprouts to alfalfa, azuki, arugula, broccoli, radish, clover, chia, fenugreek, mustard, onions, all different kinds of lentils, all different kinds of peas. And I had so many sprouts growing that I didn't have the capacity to consume all of the sprouts. Like, there was just too much. And the sprouts have a lot of flavor. They have bitter, sweet, chewy, savory. There's all these different textures and flavors and what what it took for me to kind of step back. And then I needed to come up with a various plan. But I was concerned originally that maybe I was going to become emaciated. I was going to become like some weak being. And it turned out like I was. I became my strongest version of myself. While consuming the sprouts, I had the energy. I had explosive running and sprinting in my high intensity. And I was able to do all of my physical workout, my strength training, and not feel the most remote deficient in this. And that's when I started to call people. I called Dr. Jed Fahey at Johns Hopkins, who gave me the whole education download on sulforaphane. And he's become an advisor to me, head of my scientific advisory. I'm bored right now. And we speak every week and we're working on different parts about phytochemicals coming out of the sprouts and the bioavailability. And we're also exploring the depth of sprout safety because turns out no one was promoting sprouts, period. So I felt when I discovered this, like, how can I discover something that is part of nature, that's Been around since the beginning of time. So I didn't discover anything. All I did was the necessity became the form of invention. And I discovered for myself, hey, this is a great source of food. Like, I could grow my own vegetables. And in my mind I said, I'm never going to buy vegetables in the grocery store again. Like I'll just grow all of my own vegetables. And that's what I've been doing. And look, I'm not saying that other people should do this or you should boycott Whole Foods or Publix or Albertsons because they serve a purpose of distribution, but if you look at broccoli in the grocery store, it's at least a week, probably two weeks old, and by the time you're getting it, and there's a lot of research going in in Darren Olian's book, he went into the depth of when you cut the vegetable out of the ground, it starts to die, it starts to decay. So it's still raw.

Yeah. Darren's been on the show before, by the way. The superfood hunter, Darren Olan.

Yeah. So Darren is terrific. He just came and visited me here in the desert and we ate a lot of sprouts.

Yeah, yeah. He's got a TV show, he travels around the world with another friend of mine, Zac Efron, and they go all over the place. It's actually a pretty entertaining show. And if you want to see what Darren does, you go, do you remember.

The name of his TV show, Down to Earth?

Yeah, down to Earth. And I have a couple of podcasts with them as well. And so you started doing all this sprouting and you found that basically sprouts could form the lion's share of your diet. And you did pretty well on that. Even from like an amino acid protein and energetic standpoint.

Yeah, it's actually pretty incredible to think about that. Every sprout has every single amino acid for every to form a protein.

No kidding. So you don't have to like, if you're vegan or you're eating a plant based diet, you know, there's this concept of combining grains with rice or, you know, combining a legume with a grain, you know, throughout the day to get your complete protein profile. You're saying if you're sprouting, that becomes far less essential.

Yeah, if you're consuming enough calories from enough variety of sprouts. Right now on my, on my countertop I've got two half gallon jars with garbanzo beans sprouting in them. A handful, 1 cup of garbanzo beans sprouted is 25 grams of protein and, like, 250 calories.

That's pretty good.

So.

And although I'm not going to stop eating rib eye steaks, Doug, there's no way that meat at this point in my life will stop coming prizing the majority of my diet. But I really love to dress them up with sprouts like it's a match made in heaven. And I do this kind of, like, bastardized version of a carnivore diet where I'll include things like honey and berries and barely any seeds and nuts. Not into those at all, really. Very few grains, aside from, like I mentioned, occasional slice of my wife's fermented sourdough bread. You know, a lot of bone broth, a lot of liver and heart and kidney. But from a vegetable standpoint, you know, for the past couple of years, I've gotten super duper. Not against vegetables, but not really a fan of including them in my own personal diet except sprouts and something else. And I'll have you clarify the difference on this once we finish the story. Shoots and microgreens. Like sprout shoots and microgreens. If I do vegetables, that's what I go for when I'm at home. When I travel, I'll still do whatever. If I'm at a steakhouse, I'll have a salad or whatever. But for the most part, sprout shoots and microgreens at home is what my vegetables actually look like.

Yeah, well, look, Ben, I love you unconditionally, and I don't try to change people. Right. I'm sharing what works for me.

You better not, because I eat rib eyes. And I'd crush you.

I know. And you'd also shoot me with a bow and arrow, but I'm nonviolent. But I think the thing is, for me, I was concerned that maybe being alone in the desert, like, I was going crazy. So I reached out to Dr. Axe, to Joel Fuhrman, to Mark Hyman, to Joel Kahn, Dean Ornish. A variety of people who had different philosophies, whether it was keto or paleo or functional medicine or straight plant based. And what they all had in common, other than wanting to help people, because I sincerely think they all want to help people. They all love sprouts. They were all into sprouts. And I was like, wow, this is amazing. While they argue about everything else, there was alignment about sprouts. And that gave me the confidence that a. I was doing the right thing. And look, I love the Taste of meat. There's no question it doesn't work for me. So I went down this plant based, sprout based part and now I feel terrific when I think about that you can grow a pound of sprouts using less than a gallon of water. Because I'm in the desert, water is sparse. I have to be really cognizant about my water utilization part. So when I think about the water use utilization, I think about the yield and I think about how the multiplicative impact of taking one cup of seeds and being able to turn them into 10 cups of vegetables of food, that was just mind blowing to me. I couldn't believe why didn't other people know this. Then when I start to work on the research part and I think about a, the sulforaphane and the anticancer properties of it, the ability to reduce inflammation of the heart, the impact it has on Alzheimer's, how the sulforaphane can create heat shock proteins in the brain that reduce symptoms of autism, and how you can reduce the fasting blood sugar levels to improve the hemoglobin A1C. That for people with type 2, type 1, type 1.5, gestational diabetes can all be positively impact from the consumption of sprouts. This was unbelievable for me and it became my kind of next mountain was to share this message.

Yeah, well, I'm certainly glad I got my hands on the book because it was super helpful. And I talked to a lot of these health influencers who are into sprouts and shoots and microgreens, but they're all rich because they got websites and podcasts and blogs and apparently they've cracked the code on that. And maybe I'm a cheapskater, maybe I haven't quite figured out that part of the business, but I don't think a lot of people make them at home. And I've always known sprouts and microgreens and shoots were good for you. But I always just bought them. Once I read your book and started making them, I'm like, holy cow, this is cheap and effective. So I do have a few, a few more logistical questions for you though, if that's okay.

Absolutely.

Okay. All right. So sometimes when you, when you do that first rinse, you know that, that, that short few minutes, soak and then rinse that initial one. Apparently you're supposed to put something in the water to make sure that, that any, any type of, I believe it's like any type of mold or mycotoxin or maybe herbicides or pesticides or whatever, get. Get cleaned off of the seeds. Am I correct? Because I've just been using like a vitamin C, like an ascorbic acid cleaning solution when I first rinse them. But do you need to. Well, what do you use? And do you need to do that even if you're buying, like, let's say, organic seeds?

Here's the fact. Everything that you put in your mouth is risky, right? Everything. So if you want to be cautious, the precautionary measure, and there's a lot of this covered in my book, you can take a rapid oxidizing agent, whether it's hydrogen peroxide, parasitic acid, grapefruit seed extract, and believe it or not, it's not my favorite, but it's very effective. Is just bleach, right? Regular bleach.

I know. I thought that would be weird, too. The first time I heard about that was when I interviewed Ann Louise Gittleman, who's known as the first lady of nutrition on my show, and she explained it to me. If you weren't able to buy organic vegetables, you can literally rinse them, either vinegar solution or just bleach. I thought that was kind of weird, but then I looked into it. As long as you rinse it off, it's not that bad for you.

Well, and the bleach will oxidize and turn into saline and it's being diluted, but it will have impact on what could be the various forms of pathogens. Look, if you're taking a seed out of the field, it could have rat poop on it. Just period. So you want to be intelligent in thinking about how can you reduce the microbial load, the pathogenic load on the seed. Now, it turns out by using higher quality seeds, they are testing in batches. So they're not testing every single seed, but they're testing in batches for pathogens. E. Coli, Listeria, salmonella. So they're testing in batches for pathogens, which to me is a hell of a lot better than not testing for it. Right. So that's a good stage. And then you taking a precautionary level of rinsing the seeds. It's a very quick process. You take one of these agents, you add it to the water, you add the seeds, you strain them out, and then you begin your germination process. Takes literally minutes. And it's a good level. So I recommend that in the book, if you're asking me, do I do it all the time. Personally, no. Sometimes I do not do that because I've never had a Problem. And I've never heard of a problem with homegrown seeds creating foodborne illnesses. I think about 20 years ago, there were issues at, like, Jimmy John's and fast food restaurants where they were taking who knows what their process was to grow the seeds and the sprouts. And then there was cross contamination, which resulted in recalls, health issues, but in homegrown, small batch things, it just hasn't been an issue at all. And I have a data scientist, Jack, out of the Netherlands, who's been, you know, we just downloaded the entire CDC database for the last 23 years, studying every foodborne illness, every outbreak, every issue, across everything. So I'm happy to share with you, you know, as we conclude our research, to really look at safety, because we all want to be healthy. So I wanted to make sure that sprouts were safe. And to answer your other question while we're on it, sprouts, shoots, microgreens, these are all labels. Like, in nature, there's no such thing. Right. You have a seed and you have a plant. You have a plant organism. The definition of the difference between a sprout and a microgreen can be defined in two different areas. The microgreen is generally grown on a tray, and it shoots up. And it usually has a sprouting medium, whether it be soil or jute or a paper towel or something. And there's a chapter in my book about microgreens.

You got at some point, get the sprouts out of the jar and transfer them to a growing medium so they go a little bit beyond the sprouting phase to do the microgreens.

Correct the difference. Also, when you're growing the microgreens, they require a level of fertilizer. Right. They need some extra oomph to get past the week. So what I love about the sprouts is that within that seed, it contains the endosperm, the embryo, and the nutrition source to go from this dormant, living organism into a vegetable that has a root and a shoot and leaves form. And it can do that without the soil, without the sunshine, without the fertilizer. And that, to me, was the revelation that got me all in on sprouts.

Yeah, yeah. So the microgreens would be something. And I'm sure people may have seen these little things at the grocery store before. It's a very, very nutritious stage of the plant. From what I understand, it's even more nutritious than a sprout. But you got to transfer them to a growing medium like you just alluded to you transfer the sprouts to some type of a growing medium. And sometimes that can be as simple as a paper towel with some type of fertilizer. And then the shoots, those are something that. It's very, very similar to a microgreen, except you kind of like, harvest the shoots before the leaves appear. And so it's kind of like, I guess, halfway between a sprout and a microgreen. And I believe, if I recall, you get into this in your book a little bit, but you even, like, talk about everything from alfalfa to broccoli to garbanzo clover and so on and so forth in terms of, you know, what you kind of like, in terms of which ones are good for sprouts, which ones are good for microgreens, which one are good for. For shoots, you know, like, I like sunflower. Like sunflower shoots. Oh, my gosh. Absolutely love those. You know, but for sprouts or, you know, for broccoli, I like sprouts better. So it kind of depends. But I don't know if you agree with me, Doug, but I think everybody should just start with sprouts. Like, that's, like, the easiest place to start, right?

Yeah. And I would also just throw in there that I don't think that microgreens are categorically more nutritious than sprouts. I think there's some development parts where they have more of certain nutrients or phytochemicals in them because they're developed. But also the difference between sulforaphane content in sprout versus microgreens, there's more sulforaphane potential and glucoraphanin in the sprout because it's concentrated. So as the seed develops and grows from a sprout to a microgreen, it's actually the glucoraphanin is being diluted. So it's not categorical. What I will say is microgreens are much more concentrated than mature vegetables, and they're more tender. But the yield you get from microgreens is far less and takes longer than sprouts and is more difficult to grow. So from a level like, I love sunflower shoots. I'm growing them actually, believe it or not, in jars, which is kind of gnarly to do because you have to almost hand remove every one of the shells, but it can be done. But the other thing that I love about sprouts is you get to eat the whole thing. When you're growing the microgreen, you're basically eating above the Fold like you're leaving the root. And the root has a lot of nutritious. If you think about root vegetables, roots are an incredible source of nutrients. And so leaving them behind, I'd rather just eat the whole thing.

That's a good point. If you listen to my podcast with Dr. Thomas Cowan, the name of that podcast is actually how to how to eat more vegetables. We get into the threefold concept of Rudolf Steiner and his writings on anthroposophy. I believe it was called anthroposophy. Hopefully I'm pronouncing that the right way in which he gets into how different components of the plant, the stem, leaf, the flower, fruit and the root have differing impacts on our physiology. Like leaves and stems are often used for heart and circulatory support. And many times the flowers are used for digestive disturbances. The roots, like a comfrey root, is sometimes used for joints. And so I agree that eating the plant, you know, like you'd eat an animal nose to tail. Sorry to say that, Doug. You eat the plants, you know, basically all parts of the plants. And a lot of times you get a little bit more out of it from a, from a physiology standpoint. I'll link to that podcast with Dr. Cowan in the. In the show notes. If you guys go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com/SproutsPodcast to understand more about that concept. And so Doug, you know, we've got our sprouts, are making our sprouts. We've read the book, we go through the whole thing. One other kind of quick logistical question for you would be getting the seeds themselves. Do you have any particularly favorite seed sources that are kind of like your. Your go to in terms of guaranteeing you're probably going to get a pretty decent seed?

Yeah, I mean the first thing that I would say, Ben, and this is not. These are commodities and they change. The good supplier today is maybe not the good supplier tomorrow because they run out. So one of the things that I've been doing is really working on the seed supply chain on my website, thesproutbook.com I'm working on and will be aggregating and sending out the information of what's hot, what's now for real time suppliers. Today I buy seeds from Sproutman in small quantities. I buy my bulk sometimes in Truleaf Market or Sprout House or in Canada from Mums mu m m s. It's very dynamic because there's no supplier today that has all the right seeds in the right levels and what I'm looking at is a level of specificity and traceability, because I want to know where my food is coming from, which means I want to know where the seed is coming from. I want to know the process for harvesting. I want to know, are they treated in all levels? I guess I'm shining a light on the industry and on the sources so that we can have very consistent levels. Because when we talk about sulforaphane and we talk about broccoli sprouts, it's almost like saying, oh, an apple. Are you talking about a Red Delicious apple? Are you talking about a Golden Delicious? Are you talking about a Braeburn or Pink Lady? There's all these varieties today because the sprouting industry is so new. Everything is just a generic term. And I want to get to the levels, looking at what are the levels of the phytochemicals and the antioxidants that are in these seeds and the potential so that I can plan accordingly, because I'm eating for health now.

It's obviously a quite laborious process, sprouting at home. And there's all sorts of issues that you run into. Like, you got, like, the sacks that people will sprout in, which can be unsanitary and tough to clean and kind of unsightly. Hanging all over the kitchen. These sacks full of sprouts. You may have seen them at your hippie neighbor's house. You walk in, the place smells like patchouli, and there's sacks all over the place. You got the jars, which I've done, and I like those better. You know, they're a little bit clumsy, a little bit laborious. You got a lot of multiple components. Sometimes they can dominate a little bit of counter space or pantry space. And then some people sell these, like, systems even on Amazon, where we got, like, sprouting trays. And I know that those can work pretty well. You get some uneven growth and drainage and watering, but those can work. And then there's even these, like, done for you auto sprouters. You know, in the same way that people are now coming up with full on, like, backyard patio hydroponic vertical growing systems that I think have begun to become quite popular during COVID when people are wanting to grow a lot of this stuff at home, but may not have a full garden space in their backyard. You got these. These machines that'll. That'll do a lot of it. But in many cases, you know, they. They clog, they recirculate dirty water. They have kind of, like an unsightly design that can be very complicated to clean. Kind of like a juicer, you know, it gives you good juice, but you got a ton of cleanup, and you're scrubbing your entire machinery for hours afterwards. In terms of sprouting, is there any way to make it easier? Is there some kind of a system that is out there that just would allow you to just put in your seeds and kind of walk away?

Yeah, I mean, I think that's something that, as you know, I'm a hacker and I'm an engineer, and I've got my lab and I'm working on a lot of things to really bring that vision to bear. Because I think merely adding water just creates biofilm and slime and that, you know, I was very concerned with mold. So in the testing that we did, across a variety of samples, 100% of them had yeast on the samples of the seeds. So 100%. And then there's all the different mold that were showing up, from penicillin to foma to cladosporium and Alternaria. Like, there's mold on these things. And so I think in a level of automation, you know, the process really needs to work. I mean, we could zoom in and I could show you one of the robotic arms that you look for sprouting, and they can simplify. But what you hit on is you need the water source, you need the circulation, and you need to start with the right seed. So the first thing that I really like to start to share is the process. So taking the information that was in the book, codifying that into software, and then creating a community where people could share their information about sprouts and get guidelines and reminders and then have visual reference, because you could look at the seeds.

You mean like an app or something that would say, okay, you got this seed, do this, walk away. Maybe you got like a notification set up that tells you when to change.

The water, stuff like that, 100% push notifications. And then the ultimate end, all, like, this is the panacea, would be the metaphor of like a rice cooker for sprouts. Add water, add seeds, set it and let it. And then get a notification, sprouts are done, and then harvest a perfect crop. That gave you the economic advantage of, like, if you were to buy sprouts in the health food store, might be $5 for that little container, plastic container with some sprouts in it. If you buy the seeds, and I'm really working on the seeds, if you're buying the seeds, you could get that Same yield for about 50 cents. So there's a 10x impact of value if you're willing to do a little work. Some people don't want to do the work. And if you ask me why sprouting isn't mainstream is people get excited, they buy the jars, they miss a few washes, they screw up, and then they go off to doing something else. I want to make it a stickier process for them so they could start and gain the benefit of the sprouts. And the only way they're going to do it is by getting into a system and forming this sprout habit.

Yeah, well, I think that, I mean, it's one of those things that I believe is probably in its infancy in terms of technology that would make this a lot easier to do for me. I don't mind. I'm a little bit of just like a dirty prepper on the inside, and I don't mind the jars and the countertop space. And I almost find it meditative in the same way that I love to cook. I mean, you're talking to a guy who spent an hour last night making a colostrum cream pumpkin spice cake in my kitchen. Because that's what I'll do at the end of the day, I relax when I'm cooking, I just don't think about anything. I'll put on a podcast or an audio book and just make stuff. It was a pretty good cake, by the way. I had a slice for breakfast, but anyways, so I don't mind that. But I know a lot of people that just want to get the seeds, push a button and go. And those are the people who may want the affordability of sprouts, but don't necessarily, you know, want to, you know, grow them themselves and also don't want to go to, you know, whatever, erewhon and buy a $15 little plastic container of microgreens. And so, you know, I think that, that some kind of like a done for you sprouting system would be kind of, kind of next level. So I would encourage you to keep working on that because I, I will certainly be a fan of it and will spread the news far and wide once something like that happens, because I think it'd be pretty cool.

The biggest thing that we can talk about is getting people the demand for it and getting people turned on to sprouting and tuned in to it, and then everything else becomes easy. Right now the sprouting was relegated to hippies and it didn't cross over to the mainstream. But I Think after there was more than 2,000 peer reviewed published white papers on the impact of the medicinal properties of sprouts. Like we talked a little bit about sulforaphane, but we didn't even discuss the Indole 3 Carbinol. So it's a chemical that's found in brassica vegetables, cauliflower, broccoli, mustard greens, brussels sprouts, but in much, much higher concentration in broccoli sprouts and in watercress sprouts and in other sprouts. And the anti cancer properties for the melanoma and lupus and stopping the growth of cancer cells in the early stage of development is incredible. And people are just scratching the surface of a natural form of anti cancer properties. I don't know. And I could go on, but another thing which is really powerful is just the dao, which is the thymine oxidase, which is the digestive enzyme used to break down excess histamine in the body.

Yeah, I was gonna say that's a very popular supplement for people who are histamine sensitive, which is actually a lot of people.

Right. So imagine being able to sprout green peas and get high concentrations of DAO in a natural whole food format of the sprouts, boosting your DAO levels by growing the sprouts. And that's something can easily be worked on. I'm looking at sprouts as food. I look at sprouts as vitamins and minerals. And literally sprouts contain every vitamin, mineral, antioxidant, prebiotic, probiotic, polyphenol, all the individual amino acids and it's all there. And if you're concentrated, and I've heard you talk about being able to, if you want concentrated protein isolate, you know you got a product for that, right?

Yeah.

So if you want to grow a food and have your food being able to have these other parts and you want to be able to do it dirt cheap, pennies a serving, sprouts are your answer. So I can't, I literally can't believe why everyone isn't sprouting. Whether you're carnivore, herbivore, fast food eater, sprouts seem to fit in to everyone's potential diet.

It's the same reason people don't cook their own food. I mean, most people won't even make a hamburger if there's an option to go buy one in five minutes from the fast food joint. It's just the nature of folks. But my listeners, Doug, my listeners, they do dig this stuff. And I would love to see More people, you know, posting on Instagram and messaging me and saying, dude, I listened to that podcast interview with Doug. I'm now making my own sprouts. It's changed my life and my whole approach to vegetables. And I can eat greens again and not have digestive issues. I just think there's a lot going for these little bad boys. And so I would encourage everybody listening and try it at least once. I dare you. I dare you. Try making sprouts at least once. You will be shocked at how easy it is. And, you know, if you have kids, I mean, honestly, like, my kids and I can tag team a batch. I get them all started. You know, I do that initial 10 minutes of, you know, rinsing and soaking and getting them in the jars. I put the jars at a 45 degree angle and then tell my sons. I'm like, all right, guys. You river, you rinse them in the morning. You taryn, you rinse them in the evening, put them back at the 45 degree angle. Within five days, we got sprouts coming out our buttholes. Not literally. They don't actually grow in your digestive tract. Don't worry, folks. You eat enough dirt and enough seeds maybe, but for the most part, they're, as Doug and I have already established, super easy to digest. And especially if you work on it as a family, so easy to make at home. And, you know, it's kind of like, you know, at our house, my wife's always got the starter going for the sourdough bread. I've always got the kefir grains and the sprouts rotating for my kefir and for my sprouts. You know, my sons are out milking toffee the goat in the morning and bringing in them the milk, and my wife's making the goat cheese. My sons are getting the eggs from the chickens in the morning. And that's wonderful. We go harvest the vegetables from our eight different raised garden beds. Now we got a greenhouse going, so we'll get stuff from that too. And, you know, once you get all this stuff rotating, it's like brushing your teeth. It's like a habit. And the cool thing is the confidence, too. I mean, if shit hits the fan today, Doug and the. Whatever the Chinese black helicopters go and blow up Washington, D.C. or whatever the. Whatever the people are complaining about regarding the. The great reset and everything else going on, I. I can literally, like, not leave my house for the next probably decade, and I'll be just fine. I might have to shoot the occasional whitetail Deer. But aside from that, I'll. I'll be. I mean, and even that's right on my property. So I'll. I'll be fine. But I don't want to give people the impression you have 10 acres and greenhouses and goats and chickens. To do this. You literally need, like, you know, your pantry in a cold, dark place and some cheap jars and some cheap seeds. And I mean, like, do not fear about toilet paper shortages. You can eat for eons using some of the methods that Doug lays out in his book. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to link to the book if you're listening and you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com sproutspodcast Doug, I'd be remiss to let you go without asking you, what's your favorite kind of like, outside the box recipe? I mean, we talked about you could throw the sprouts in the smoothie or toss them on a salad and yawn. Everybody kind of knows that. But do you have any, like, super unique way that you like to use sprouts or shoots or microgreens that you think more people should know about that you just really love?

Yeah, I think one. You know, I mentioned and I didn't. We didn't talk about this, but you could actually sprout garbanzo beans in as little as 12 hours. So you. I could take garbanzo beans, and I don't know what your current thinking is on ferments and pickles, but if you take a cup of sprouted garbanzo beans, you take a pickle and some of the pickle juice, throw it in the blender, you have brine. The brine. The brine. Thank you. You take the brine, you have the best fresh, raw, living hummus that money could buy.

No way. Okay, wait, walk me through that again. You take the garbanzo brines, you sprout them in like, 12 hours, and then what do you do?

Then you put them in a blender with a pickle, because I like the pickle to add a little bit of texture, and it becomes creamier than the sprouted garbanzo beans. And then about 3 ounces of the brine. So you've got 8 ounces of sprouted garbanzo beans. You have a pickle, which is probably like 3 or 4 ounces, and then you have 3 liquid ounces of brine, and that, like, in one minute, you have a hummus.

That's amazing. And the chickpeas, I can just, like, soak those overnight. After I do that, initial rinse, drain them. And once I see those little sprouts coming out of the. Out of the backside of the bean, I can literally just take that and blend it with a little bit of the brine. A few ounces of the brine and one of the pickles.

Exactly.

I'm writing a note to myself because I got pickles. My wife makes pickles all the time. I got garbanzo beans. We always have a big mason glass jar of them. I'm writing a note to myself, dude, I'm going to do that this week, and I'm going to post the hummus to Instagram.

Yeah, I think you have to do.

I'm excited.

Yeah. And so it's interesting that once you have that base of the hummus, you could start to throw any other sprouts in it. That just becomes your base. It's the garbanzo pickle hummus. But you could add your lentils into it. And, like, the lentils, you know, literally lentils are also fast sprouters. So, right. They're 12 hour sprouters. And in 12 hours, when you sprout lentils, you double the antioxidant levels, you triple the vitamin C. Right. Just by sprouting and activating those dormant lentils. And if you continue to rinse them for, like, three or four days, you will quadruple the fiber level. And at any stage, 12 hours to four days, you could add some lentils into your garbanzo pickle hummus, and that'll add a crunchier, nuttier flavor. It'll change the color, and they're all different size. I like, I'm into the French lentils now, but my brother, who doesn't like, quote, unquote, eating sprouts, he's eating a ton of sprouts because he doesn't even know it. He's just eating hummus. Right. So he doesn't know that you're mixing.

That in, like putting vegetables in your kid's spaghetti sauce. I'm glad somebody's sitting around in the desert thinking of these things. So this is going to happen. All right. I'm excited. This might be one of the first things I do before, before I get on my next call is I might go throw some garbanzo beans in a glass jar here. Doug, thank you so much for coming on the show. I know we've been trying to do this for a while. I'm glad we finally connected because this is something that I think is gonna be super cool and useful for people to know about. And I'll link to your book. I'll link to everything that we talked about in the shownotes. If folks, go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com sproutspodcast I'll link to my other episode with Darren Olian that we mentioned. I'll link to some sprouting jars and sprouting stands on Amazon that let you get started with this dirt cheap. So it's all going to be at BenGreenfieldFitness.com sproutspodcast Doug, thanks for coming on the show, man.

Hey, my pleasure, Ben. Anytime. Looking forward to doing it again soon.

All right folks, I'm Ben Greenfield along with Doug Evans signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com have an amazing week. In compliance with the FTC guidelines, please assume the following about links and posts on this site. Most of the links going to products are often affiliate links, of which I receive a small commission from sales of certain items. But the price is the same for you, and sometimes I even get to share a unique and somewhat significant discount with you. In some cases, I might also be an investor in a company I mention. I'm the founder, for example, of Kion llc, the makers of Kion branded supplements and products, which I talk about quite a bit. Regardless of the relationship, if I post or talk about an affiliate link to a product, it is indeed something I personally use, support and with full authenticity and transparency recommend. In good conscience, I personally vet each and every product that I talk about. My first priority is providing valuable information and resources to you that help you positively optimize your mind, body and spirit. And I'll only ever link to products or resources, affiliate or otherwise, that fit within this purpose. So there's your fancy legal disclaimer.