Fast Fitness - Sprouts Inside and Out

Here is Fast Friday Fitness - easy, good tasting, healthful food you can grow yourself in your kitchen. Sprouting seeds can be fun to do with children to teach them many things about food, responsibility, biology, and more. Mung beans are a good easy bean to start with:

1. Spread a bunch of dry beans on a plate. Add enough water to wet the beans. Leave out on a sunny counter.
2. Rinse beans and plate daily, and return beans to the plate with fresh water.
3. Within a week, you will have fresh sprouts.

Sauté lightly in a pan with balsamic vinegar, a slight amount of olive or grapeseed oil, and season with any variety of healthful spices that you like - curry, pepper, fresh lemon, etc. Scramble the sprouts into whatever vegetables or other good food you are cooking.

If you eat the sprouts when they are barely sprouted, it will taste nuttier. If you wait until the sprouts have grown long, they will taste more like greens.

Sprouted sunflower, clover, broccoli, radish, lentil, mung bean, and pea sprouts taste good and have many vitamins and disease-fighting phytochemicals. Sprouting seeds and grains reduces the amounts of phytates in the food, which in turn, increases absorption of minerals like calcium.

The post Junk Food Through Your Skin? told how sprouts contain sulphoraphane, which activates cancer-fighting enzymes in your own cells throughout your body, making sprouts healthy not only when eaten, but when used as part of homemade sunscreens.