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Basically, some foods may need to be prepared before being eaten or cooked, for easier digestion. Seeds and nuts are produced by the plant and protected by different mechanisms to sprout only in the right conditions. Humans will be able to digest them and get their full nutritional value when this protection is lost. The most common way of removing protection is soaking.

For seeds and nuts like almonds, sunflower or pumpkin seeds, they can be soaked before consuming, or soaked for a few hours and air dried at low temperatures. In the case of pulses like beans, lentils, fava beans, chick peas (garbanzo beans), they need to be soaked overnight. Soaking also reduces make the cooking times shorter and make legumes easier to digest as they lose some of their gas-producing substances in the soaking water. Always discard the soaking water and, if you can, change it twice during cooking. Some beans can be eaten as uncooked sprouts, providing more easily digested carbohydrates, fibre, vitamins and minerals than their dried counterparts (lentils, mung beans).

Learn more about Nutrition with our Human Nutrition I course.