The study – published Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry – suggests that microgreens punch above their weight when it comes to nutritional value.
Led by Dr Qin Wang of the University of Maryland, USA, the research team found seedlings of greens including red cabbage, cilantro, and radish harvested less than 14 days after germination contain up to 40 times higher levels of vital nutrients including vitamin C, K, E, and beta-carotene than their mature counterparts.
The authors noted that although many nutritional claims have been made about microgreens on the internet, “to the best of our knowledge, no scientific data are available on the exact phytochemical content of microgreens.”
“When we first got the results we had to rush to double and triple check them."
Dr Qin Wang
The team said they were ‘astonished’ by the results they found: “The microgreens were four- to 40-fold more concentrated with nutrients than their mature counterparts,”said Dr Wang.
For example, red cabbage microgreens had 40 times more vitamin E and six times more vitamin C than mature red cabbage, whilst cilantro microgreens had three times more beta-carotene mature cilantro, the researchers confirmed.
“When we first got the results we had to rush to double and triple check them,” said Wang.
Study details
The research team determined the essential vitamin and carotenoid concentrations of 25 commercially available microgreens varieties.
“Results showed that different microgreens provided extremely varying amounts of vitamins and carotenoids,” noted Wang and his team.
However they revealed that in general microgreens contain ‘considerably higher’ concentrations of vitamins and carotenoids than their mature plant counterparts.
“All of these nutrients are extremely important for skin, eyes, and fighting cancer and have all sorts of benefits associated with them,” added Dr Gene Lester, of the USDA, who also worked on the project.
“To find that the levels were not only detectible but in some cases 4-6 times more concentrated than in the leaves of a mature plant, I find that quite astonishing,” he added.
Wang and his team said the data generated by the research will help to provide a scientific basis for evaluating the vitamin and carotenoid concentrations of other microgreens in the future – in addition to acting as a possible reference in estimating the dietary intake and adequacies of vitamins from microgreens.
But Wang and his team noted that since growing, harvesting, and postharvest handling conditions may all have a considerable impact on the synthesis and degradation of phytonutrients – including vitamins and carotenoids – further research will be needed to evaluate the effect agricultural practices on phytonutrient retention.
