The Sprout Effect: Tiny Plants, Big Health Benefits

Introduction to the Summit and Doug Evans 0:00

Well. Hello, everybody. Welcome to another amazing. Don't move. Take out your notepad and pen and you're going to take notes. Session of reversing our disease naturally summit. We have for the first time on the summit for me Doug Evans a friend for years and years. And we're finally getting around to exploring a really key topic because everybody wants practical stuff. I want a healthy heart. I want to feel vibrant. I want good skin. I want to sleep well, I don't want to take medication. And we need practical approaches.

And Doug has evolved to a world expert on many things natural. But certainly the topic of the sprouting and something. The minute we're done talking, you can start doing this and improve your nutrition. Not every lecture we have in this summit can you immediately do something different. So I met, Doug. He may not remember, but in New York City, Organic Avenue. And he was really a pioneer in bringing fresh squeezed juices to little tiny corners of places in New York with bright orange banners and, a real, real pioneer, given how big the juice industry is.

And then another phase of his life. More in juicing. But now it's all about sprouting. Why? You know why even grind these things up and make juice? Why just not eat them? So, Doug, thank you for being here. Oh, it's a pleasure, Joel. You know, you've been such a fountain of information and such a good friend over these decades that it's a real honor and a privilege to be on this, on this recording and to be his part of your, sharing of information. So I am I am here, and, I was looking forward to three years in a row.

I wanted to be on this, so. All right, well, I'm glad we're doing it. And just in case anybody. I just want to show you, you do want to know the name Doug Evans, and you want to go to basically the Bible of fresh, nutritious food, the sprout book. Just look at that. He's going to show us many examples of actual sprouts here.

Dougu2019s Sprouting Journey and Why Sprouts Matter 2:12

But this book is amazing. It will teach you more than most people need to know, because, Doug will show us how simple it is to add sprouts to your life. But tell us, I mean, for how many years have you. You been a juice king? But for how long have you been concentrating on sprouts? So it's really interesting. I was eating, I've been eating sprouts and growing sprouts for over 30 years. And I was eating sprouts before I was vegan, before I was plant based, before I was vegetarian because I saw them in New York at the Union Square Farmers Market.

And out of everything in the entire market, they had the brightest green chlorophyl, and they were the things that were alive and growing. So the other stuff was fresh. This was beyond fresh, this was living. And when I learned I could do it at home, I immediately started to sprout. So I've been sprouting for over 30 years. The insight oh please. No, no, God, please. The insight for me shifted when I always thought of sprouts as a garnish or as a side dish like other people. That's what I thought.

And then for the first time in my life, I moved from living in a food swamp like New York City and San Francisco and LA, where there's infinite food options from all ranges of the spectrum to I moved to Wonder Valley Hot Springs near Joshua Tree, which turned out to be an environmental desert, but also a food desert. So there was no health food stores, no vegan restaurants, no juice bars, no farmers markets. Then there's not even a gas station, within 20 minutes of here. So that's when I had my come to cucumber moment when I was like, well, how am I going to make this work?

How am I going to live a healthy life without plants? And that's when the light bulb went off in my head and I said, oh, sprouts. Like, what about sprouts? And in one cubic foot in six jars, I was growing sprouts thousands of calories a day of what turned out to be the most nutritious plants, in the planet. And I was able to grow them for under a dollar. Serving without soil, without sunshine, without fertilizer, without pesticides. And I could control when I would have a crop. So it was like within days I was able to take one scoop of seeds.

This is a quarter cup, and within five days get a whole jar of sprouts. It was like magic and so we'll get into it. But that's what got me so excited about sprouts. And you have the first edition of my book. My book now is in the 10th edition. It's now a national bestseller. The book, broken to the top 100 of all books on Amazon. So it peaked at number 69, which to me was the world is ready for sprouting. The world is ready. And it's such an amazing, you know, series of statements.

How Sprouting Works and the Jar System 5:56

And, I applaud you for, you know, helping so many of us, you know, add that nutrition, even if we're not in a food desert. But, you know, what a wonderful skill for all of us to learn, just in case we get in a situation where we don't have easy access to the local farmer's market or the local Whole Foods or whatever. And as you say, what you're doing is fresher than the local Whole Foods and the local farmers market. So you held up a jar. And I just want to make it clear, some people that are listening are thinking about walking into a vegan restaurant or a juice bar, and I'm thinking about wheat grass growing in a tray in soil, which is also spring and fresh and nutritious.

But you're showing us sprouts. They're not wheatgrass that you're growing. So what was the jar you showed us? What was the. This is this jar is broccoli sprouts. Yeah. And and you being a doctor and being a scientist, we're going to go down a little bit down the rabbit hole with them. This jar, by the way, this is lentil sprouts. Yeah. You can see. And I'm going to take a pause for a second and talk about lentils and lentil sprouts. Lentils are a staple of the plant based diet worldwide. I cannot imagine someone who's listening to this who hasn't eaten lentils and lentils are an amazing food, and when you sprout a lentil, you increase the vitamin C levels by 300% and you triple the antioxidant levels.

You take something a pulse, a legume, and you convert it into a living vegetable within days, which is enzymatic rich. And when you're eating the lentil, it's no longer just a regular lentil. It has a root, it has a shoot, it has an endosperm, it has an embryo. And it's alive. So as you're consuming this living food in a fresh raw state, it is the most bioavailable, digestible source of both carbohydrates, proteins, and even fats. And all plants contain all amino acids for complete proteins. Some have more than others.

The sprouts. And this is so exciting for being plant based. The sprouts are vegetables, so every benefit for healthy happy hearts can be achieved through the vegetables of sprouts. So we can go down the list. And I know we only have three hours for this session. So so number one sprouts can lower cholesterol. So the legumes and mung beans help reduce LDL because the fiber content helps bind and eliminate excess cholesterol from the body, improving lipid profiles and reducing the risk of heart disease and reversing, existing heart disease conditions.

So that's like, whoa, that's an amazing fact. There. For heart disease. They can improve blood pressure. Right. So sprouts are rich in potassium which helps regulate blood pressure by balancing sodium levels in the body. And this reduces the strain on the whole cardiovascular system and lowers the risk of hypertension, a major contributor of heart disease, without having to do a water fast without being on statins, you're able to, improve your blood pressure by actually eating, and you can eat a lot.

There's no limit to the sprouts because you're not pouring salt, oil, sugar, fats on the sprouts. You can eat as many sprouts as you want because sprouts are the number one weight loss food in the world. The number one because they're high in fiber, low in calories, low in fat. So the more sprouts you eat, the fuller you get, the more satiated you get. And you're actually generating the precursor to GLP one peptides without having to take a semi low tide. So it's phenomenal. You are amazing. I'm getting so excited.

Give us a few minutes on practical and we'll go back to, you know, nutritional concepts. You showed us a jar, you showed us a five Dale jar full of broccoli sprouts. And I'm not sure it was in five days for lentil sprouts, but just days earlier, five days or there was an empty glass jar. You put broccoli seeds on the one hand, you put in dried lentils in the other. Correct. And you ran some and you turned them upside down. And every day you rinse them again. Yeah. I mean, yeah, I mean, let's just back up for a second.

A seed. Yeah. Is a complete living organism in a dormant state. There are seeds that are over a thousand years old that will still germinate.

Heart Health Benefits of Sprouts 11:48

So seeds have a natural preservation system on it, right. They've got phytic acid. They've got lectins. They've got enzyme inhibitors. So that the seed is naturally preserved by taking a jar and putting in the scoop of the seeds and letting it sit. And by the way, we created a free app. And really, I did this app initially for me because I had so many sprout jars going that I needed to keep track of. When did I rinse, when did I so when would I harvest? When would I start the next crop? So I really built this app as an extension of my original captain's log when I was doing my, no exaggeration, thousand sprouting jars over the course of a year.

Right? So I had to track a lot. And then everyone that I talked about loved the app, so I decided to give the app away for free. Whether you're using a mason jar, whether you're using our sprouting jar, however you are, and the app will will guide you because there's a different level of specificity around the genomes between, the species of a broccoli seed, a radish seed, and alfalfa seed among being a garbanzo. They're all different. The similarities are, you know, if we look at the canine world between like a Chihuahua and a Great Dane, like they're all dogs and you've got a €16 dog.

You know, we all love dogs. There's huge variety. Like you would think. Some dogs look more like other species, similar to sprouts. So you soak the seeds, then you drain them out. So the most important thing you really need is a vessel and a filter. I designed this filter because the existing ones that I was using, I started off using cheesecloth which is a woven fabric. The cheesecloth actually absorbs bacteria, and every time you rinse it, the plants are shedding the sprouts or shedding technical term exudate.

And they're being collected in the fiber. And we don't need that extra bacteria. So I decided that we I want to use metal. And so then I shifted to a stainless steel window mesh screen. But turns out it was very hard to clean that because it had crevices that were also getting rusty and collecting. So I decided to model this on a dish drain that could be dishwasher safe. You could scrub it, and it would have high utility. And then I designed the jar in a very specific way to be large, so I could literally put my whole hand in it effortlessly.

And this is a big jar. This is a 100cm. So I put these dents in it so that you could grab the jar because I broke a glass jar in my kitchen. And that's problematic when you have children or you're walking around and we walk around barefoot. So I want to have glass because now when I made the decision five years ago to do glass, people like, oh, it's so much easier to do plastic. And I was like, I don't want plastic. I don't care about BPA and BSP. I don't want any plastic. So I designed this, that anything that touches the spout is glass or stainless steel.

And then the other thing is, if you notice. If you notice the jar is straight and the threads are on the outside, this allows for perfect drainage because the mason jar, which I have, like I can't even tell you how many mason jars I have. They have a bowl shape and the bowl shape. When put it, the angle actually collects water and we don't want excess water. So I decided to really, design something that I would love to use that we tested literally every angle. The problem is, if you turn it upside down fully, all the spouts stack up and it includes airflow.

So you really want to be. So that's when we did this little stand that is at a perfect 30 degree. And I could tell you, Joel, we tested every degree from one degree to 90 till we got the optimum drainage, airflow, air exchange, you know, to work and this the ability to do that. And in the book, I'm going to take a breath for a second in the book I wrote a chapter called Junkyard Dog that talks about how you can sprout with anything. Right? You could sprout with anything because the seeds, they just really want water, and you want to follow the protocol.

But if you take it seriously, you want to get something that was designed for sprouting. And then, you know, I decided to source the seeds and make the seeds organic, non-GMO. And if you see this other, icon on it, I wanted to make them certified glyphosate free. Right. So just another level of ensuring that what we were consuming was at the highest standards, because most people care more about washing their car and cleaning their house, you know, and their financial statements than they do about taking care of this human transport vehicle for their soul and their spirit.

And so from the heart perspective, which is so exciting, sprouts are really great for the heart. And I'll just go into the next like thought that I prepared for it is that they have incredible anti-inflammatory effects. So chronic inflammation is a significant factor in heart disease. And sprouts like cruciferous ones like broccoli contain these anti can't anti inflammatory compounds like sulforaphane that reduce inflammation in the blood vessels improving arterial health and reducing the risk of atherosclerosis.

Practical Ways to Eat Sprouts Every Day 18:38

So it's it's really really powerful. About that. And then we talked before about antioxidants. So sprouts are packed with antioxidants like flavonoids like vitamin C and vitamin E which neutralize free radicals and prevent oxidative stress. So if you have oxidative stress you are putting stress over your entire system. And so this protects the heart and blood vessels from damage caused by oxidative stress and reducing the risk of heart disease and stroke. So so that's really, really powerful. And then the next part, which is seeming so obvious, to me.

But I, I tell this, I literally I'm talking about this every day. Blood sugar regulation sprouts can help stabilize blood sugar levels due to the low glycemic index. And the high fiber content and stable blood sugar helps prevent insulin resistance, which is also not only a factor for diabetes, but it's a factor for heart disease. So those are my five talking points. That that I prepared for why sprouts are great for for heart health. They're amazing. And we won't do it now because of the topic.

Focus on heart disease. But I know you could attack with the same enthusiasm. I'm talking about cancer prevention, brain health, certainly gut health. Think about what this is doing to, create a healthy microbiome. And, you know, your gut is connected to your brain, and we now know your gut is connected to your heart. So you're really, you know, covering all the bases of natural health in the Evans family. Now, you have jars going all the time, and you got radishes, broccoli sprouts and lentil sprouts and chickpea sprouts.

Okay, five days are up and you got this gorgeous jar. And just to make it clear, you're not juicing these. You're opening the jar. Are you? Creating salads? Are you creating, you know, adding them on top of other dishes? Are you just, you know, Miss Snack? So, so, so, this is the most amazing insight that I had. Sprouts being vegetables can fit anywhere into my plant based life. So number one, which was my step one. And me and your other, you know, Southfield, Michigan, you know, friend Mike Posner.

We started to do sprouts salads. So our salads were just made with sprouts and we'd use alfalfa, radish, clover, mung bean, lentils, peas, garbanzo. And we'd make these huge salads that were filled with sprouts. And not everyone wants that much salad. I love it. That is my staple. Then I would start to wrap just for really flavor and also for my medium chain omega threes. I wanted a direct source of EPA and DHA, which turns out to be algae in the form of nori seaweed. So I would take my sprout salad and I'd roll it into a wrap.

And then I had this light bulb moment, because I have some people in my family suffer from oppositional disorder. So whatever you offer them, they want the opposite. So I would say, hey, do you want some sprouts? Do you want to sprout salad? And he was like, no, no, I want sushi. And and bingo, we replaced rice with alfalfa sprouts and clover sprouts. They're crunchy, they're chewy. And all of a sudden you add the wasabi, you add the cucumber, you add the avocado, and you get this beautiful, tight sushi like wrap.

You can then take the rice and mix it with legumes. And that's your rice and beans, so you can mix them with legumes. You can mix them with any of the among beans. And now you're getting rice and beans. So that was one like real breakthrough moment. The next one, which was extraordinary, was. Replacing pasta, whether it was macaroni, whether it was elbows, whether it was spaghetti, which sprout. And I can tell you, can you try this at home, replace the pasta with sprout and still use whatever sauce you want.

You want to take a, beyond Meat crumble with a marinara sauce? And and what would have been your meatballs and spaghetti? You now having your meatballs and sprouts and you're adding marinara. You're adding pesto. There's all of these things that are happening that you can use, the sprouts as a substitute for then simple things. We like ferments. We make our own sauerkraut. If you take these lentils and you mix them one part lentil, one part sauerkraut, you have a salad that is salty, it's savory.

It's, fermented super for gut health. And so that's one thing. The next thing further down the oppositional, road, we went, my brother then said, I want hummus. I like hummus, and so I took with Ben Greenfield a non vegan, right, a non vegan. I had to appear, I had the opportunity to appear on his podcast twice. I think I'm the only vegan yet on his podcast. And, we made sprouted garbanzo beans with a pickle and pickle brine, and we made a hummus. And this had all the characteristics of a mediterranean, hummus.

It had the texture, it had the flavor, but it was living hummus and it was delicious. So what I will tell you is that I can eat. I don't want to chew with my mouth open on your, on your show, but I can eat the sprouts right out of the jar like it's my my fast food is I grab a jar of sprouts. We go through two full jars of sprouts every day in our house. So we are constantly staggering and growing the sprouts because we love it. And it's easy and it's inexpensive. And your child now is, what, about three?

No, she's two years and three months old. And she's chewing down. Oh, she's been she's been eating sprouts since she was six months old. My wife ate sprouts throughout her entire pregnancy. And my daughter developed in utero, flavor development. So she loves savory. She loves spicy. She loves, you know, all of the things.

Sprouting Company, App, and Seed Quality 26:08

So she doesn't have a sweet tooth. She's never had. Like, she hasn't even had any, ice cream. She's never had candy. She's never had, like, a potato chip. So in her world, the food is that we make like that's food. The other stuff I like I point out and I go, oh no, we don't eat chairs. Those people, they're eating chairs. They're eating, you know, basketballs like that stuff. You know, they're there must be filming for some movie. And we just got a harvest, right? Freeze dryer. So we are making an enormous amount of freeze dried fruit.

So if we go, if we have to go to a place where there are other kids and other things, I will be rearranging things and filling up, you know, with the healthy stuff, hiding the other stuff. You know, I'm a terror. So don't invite me to your child's party unless you expect a upgrade of everything that's going on relative to health and nutrition. Right? One more practical question, and then one more informational question. That beautiful jar of broccoli sprouts in your house. You're going through two jars a day of some kind of sprouts, but something not quite to that level.

Within how many days would it be optimal to finish that jar before you can be concerned about freshness? That jar contains about five servings of the sprouts if you properly harvest, which would be to take the jar, pour it into a salad spinner, rinse it off, spin dry, store it in a non sealed non airtight container. So that it could still respire and consume oxygen and sequester carbon. That should easily last three days. And the last question, because you really have blown I'm sure most of the audience weigh with your knowledge, your enthusiasm, your handsome face.

Tales of your beautiful daughter. But you showed us a incredible jar. You showed us an incredible cap. You showed us a perfect 30 degree stand and quickly showed us a seed package. But tell them where people. And you mentioned an app, but you haven't. You've been very, Mayo. Humble about the name of the company and where people got it. They know where they go to. You know, the the company is called the Sprouting Company and it's the sprouting company, dot com, the sprouting company on Instagram, the sprouting company on TikTok, sprouting co on Onex.

And you know, the reason why they have. The app. Is and the app you can download the app in the Apple Store. It's only on iOS right now. You can download for free. And we, we did this and I did this. I created the company because I wanted to be able to share information when I did the resource section in my book that some vendors were going out of business, some had poor customer service. I bought a bunch of seeds. I talk about broccoli seeds, and then I talk about sulforaphane and the anti-cancer properties.

And then people would go out and they'd buy seeds. I bought seeds, so I took seeds from four different vendors, and I sent them to a lab to measure the level of glucosinolates, the precursor to. So first thing and one had 30 micro moles, one had 40 micro moles. And then this is the drop the mic one had zero was it was sold as broccoli seed. It was sold as organic broccoli seed. And it had no micro moles of glucose. And so I sent it to another lab where they sequenced the DNA and they came back and they go, it's in the brassica family and it has glucosinolates, but it doesn't have glucose in in it.

So and no one would know because all these seeds radish, mustard, broccoli, they all kind of look the same. So so that's when I said I needed to have a level of transparency and certification where I could feel 100% comfortable because I take my sprouts seriously. You know, and you should, and you're going to change the world. And I'll just reassure people, even though I have a fairly the first edition of this, but they are there are many of these recipes that Doug Evans is talking about. I'm looking at quinoa Taboola lemon cauliflower salad, quick pickled sprouts, green pea, avocado cream, and chia sprout wraps.

I mean, you start growing sprouts and you get the book and you use the app. You'll be made in the shade. So Doug, thank you. You really knocked it out of the park. I mean, you did. Yeah, I know you. You know, people start putting your name into the podcast searches that you've done many, many, many presentations. But I'm honored to have you with so many greats. You with Ornish, you with assholes, then you with Bernard. And they're going to say, God, I got to hang out with Doug Evans on this segment.

So thank you very much. I my pleasure, my pleasure. Thank you for having me. Thank you. Hello to your family.