There’s an old adage, “Trust, but verify.” The newer version is ‘tweet but verify.’ There are some old health remedies that just feel too healthy to bother verifying. You should anyway.
Wheatgrass juice has to be healthy, right? People voluntarily pay large sums of money for hipsters with balayaged hair to juice that shit straight from the Earth for them. Then they make that ‘I just swallowed cum’ face and go to yoga. Namaste.
When I found out it was all based on the biblical diet of King Nebuchadnezzar, I needed something stronger to drink.
Today’s Moment of Science… the enduring unprocessed bullshit of wheatgrass.
The wheatgrass craze started with Lithuanian-American immigrant Ann Wigmore, a woman with no formal medical training but a lot of unique ideas, to speak generously of them. Wigmore had been inspired by the German Lebensreform movement, meaning ‘life reform.’ A popular idea within the movement was that we’re just another animal species and the healthiest way to eat our food is raw like other animals. Followers adopted natural lifestyles, vegetarianism, nudism, and sexual liberation.
Wigmore was further inspired by the Biblical story of King Nebuchadnezzar, that he “was driven from men, and did eat grass as oxen.” The story went that the king went mad and returned after seven years of an all-grass diet, his wits having returned to him.
This was sufficient evidence that grass fixed the king’s mental health, if you asked Wigmore. Obviously, this meant it could fix all our health problems. Wigmore observed that other animals ate grass, and they didn’t seem as unhealthy as we did. Dogs and cats would eat it and regurgitate it, seemingly making them feel better when sick. She figured it helped them detox the sickness, so eating it equated to healthfulness.
Then came the bells and whistles. Wheatgrass worked because it was so high in life energy due to the chlorophyll. Wigmore proposed that chlorophyll was like hemoglobin but for plants, and so it could help for anemia in humans. It contained “liquid oxygen” from the chlorophyll, which could help kill ‘bad’ bacteria. For all the effects of the wheatgrass to really work, you needed its live enzymes. Only wheatgrass juiced from a freshly cut patch would do.
It’s important to remember that this was the 1940s and we still sucked so hard at medicine.
We’d only figured out antibiotics a decade and a half earlier, worse barbarism would be committed and justified by more informed people for years to come. Why would “chlorophyll gives you energy” sound so crazy, especially to someone who’s just trying to figure out their health? She was struggling to feel healthier and found raw foods. As do so many of us when we discover religion, keto, or bitcoin, couldn’t shut the fuck up about it but skipped the required reading, and sounded more than a bit daft in the process.
She claimed she was a doctor of multiple disciplines for which there was dubious to no confirmation. When she was sued by the Massachusetts State Attorney General for claiming that her diet could, amongst other things, treat AIDS? She retracted her claims. But not in the sense that she stopped promoting wheatgrass, just in the sense that she stopped saying it treated AIDS.
The popular claims about wheatgrass are so wrong they’re not even wrong. Chlorophyll has fuckall to do with hemoglobin. Drinking it fresh doesn’t preserve any enzymatic action for our bodies, because enzymes are denatured by heat and acid, two things it’ll encounter pretty quickly after swallowing. Though it has iron, it’s not high enough to manage anemia at the rate you consume it, and the chlorophyll certainly won’t help.
So is anything true about this grass?
It’s a source of vitamins A, B, C, E, K, and several minerals and protein. However, it’s not a dense source or complete source of protein, and there is absolutely nothing unique to the nutritional benefits of consuming wheatgrass for these nutrients. You can get all of this goodness in other sources like spinach and broccoli without making… that face.
This has been your daily moment of science telling you not to drink the bullshit raw.
Unpopular take: This Wigmore chick sounds like the perfect Oprah guest. No credentials, no research, no standing in the medical community, but calls herself a doctor, promotes bullshit, and gets rich. Can you say Dr. Oz?
Never heard of Charles Schnabel? YOSHIDE Hagiwara? Sure maybe Anne Wigmore was an eccentric quack, but do a bit more research before spreading misinformation. There’s a reason that wheat and cereal grains are the most widely consumed food in the world. Do your research
I did my research but wheatgrass shots are not the same thing as cereal, and just jumping over everything I wrote about it- that’s absolutely backed up with citations- does not help your point at all.