This is an answer posted on a blog called Winters Day about alfalfa toxicity.
About Me
- Anthropositor
- Deep South, United States
- Consultant, inventor, mentor, chess coach,. Current projects involve No Till Farming and staving off blindness due to cataracts among other projects. I also do confidential ghost writing (without taking any published credit. My current blindness makes me put this on hold for a while. I should have one eye working again in about four months. Fact, fiction, all subjects considered. I have heard My daughter Jennifer is alive. I would love it if she were to contact me here. I understand she would like to know me. I have sent a message by circuitous route. I can only hope. My posted Email works as well. We have four decades to catch up on.
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A considerable amount of material, some of it perhaps misleading or incomplete. You can find something toxic about many seeds and plants which we have been eating for centuries.
I happen to eat a few plates of sprouts per day. Depending on my mood or the other food I am serving, there may be seven to eleven different varieties of
sprouts. I also blend them into a variety of herbal seasonings for red meats, seafoods, poultry, wild game, and eggs, as well as baked goods.
The point is, I have been eating alfalfa sprouts, constituting probably a third of all the sprouts I consume. In other words, about 2/3 plate per day.
I have known of these rumors of toxicity for some time. I have not reduced the proportions of alfalfa sprouts at all.
Another sprout which is avoided by some on the basis of toxicity is Red Clover, also a legume. Quite a bit of oxalic acid in them, which is regarded as toxic. But spinach and rhubarb also has substantial oxalic acid.
It is the AMOUNTS that make the difference. Clover sprouts are about one fifth of my sprout consumption.
With these sorts of proportions the oxalic acid is actually helpful. The intestinal tract senses the presence of oxalic acid and increases the speed of peristalsis, the rythmic constrictions which push the consumed food through with greater rapidity, thus reducing the time of transit, reducing putrifaction and other forms of decay.
I am 67. Aside from being close to blind and having a half dozen teeth I repair with superglue, I am disgustingly healthy. My blood pressure was once, at highest reading, 191/110. I did not go to the doctor. I fixed it.
I take no prescriptions whatsoever. Had I gone to see a doctor, I would have been started on a virtually lifetime regime of Toprol XL or some other useless chemical; this in spite of the fact that, while these medications WILL bring the blood pressure numbers down, there is statistically no effect on the actual death rates from stroke and heart attack, So while the NUMBERS have come down, the risk of death has not. That is idiocy.
I was able without "medication" to bring the numbers down to a systolic range of 115 to 125, and a diastolic range of 72 to 84. Very rarely do I exceed these numbers. How on earth was I able to do that without a physicians close ongoing supervision and a pill regime forever? Must be luck.
A last comment about the tests that are the basis for much of the fear contained in the assessment of the dangers of sprouts. Many of the tests were in vitro, or dealt with rats or other animals. This is the style of science, which always strives to limit variables, for obvious reasons. But you cannot always look at things in simplified form and come up with valid, useful conclusions. I may or may not have time to come back here, but I will post this on my blog as well, in case anyone wants to debate these points.
If you can't readilly find my blog by googling my name, you can find 1400/1500 of my posts on Skin Cell Forum, and perhaps another 30 or so on Damn Interesting. You can argue or agree with me on any of these sites.
Pardon any typos that got past me. I am unable to see the print in the response window, and I am unable to enlarge it.