Journal

The number is real. It belongs to one nutrient in one crop. Used for microgreens as a category it is wrong in both directions, because some pairs run far above 40 and for at least one compound the mature plant is the more concentrated of the two.

2.5 grams a person is the only weighed serving in a published recipe. Computed from the yield and seed figures for 38 crops, that serving costs about 1.5 cents of seed, against retail at 16 to 21 times as much per ounce.

Cold, dry, unwashed and vented, and basil is the exception. Controlled studies cover about a dozen crops out of sixty-two, and they disagree on the best temperature.

Microgreens fit a diabetes plate like any non-starchy vegetable. Every human blood sugar trial so far used broccoli sprout powder or extract, not the fresh greens.

Eleven people, one serving, and the researchers looked at chemistry rather than symptoms. The constipation study often cited for this used sprouts, was paid for by a farm, and one good bacteria went down.

Wash them immediately before eating and never before storing. A plain-water rinse removes half to three quarters of the bacteria, not all of it, and every shelf-life number you have ever read for microgreens silently assumes the crop was never washed.

No published case report attributes an illness to eating a named edible microgreen, and at least eight recalls have produced zero illnesses. The real downsides are not health risks. They are cost, bench time and a nutrition claim that does not hold.

A flavor line for microgreens, crop by crop. Here is one for all 62 crops, and it shows the axis that actually matters is not how peppery a crop is but how much of it you can eat.