It’s supposed to be good for you to a degree that makes you wonder whether it’s too good to be true. Some of the claims are hard to believe:
“Wheatgrass juice fights body odor! Wheatgrass juice blocks tooth decay! Wheatgrass keeps gnats out of your eyes!”
And relieves arthritis, and reduces inflammation, and protects against certain cancers.
Really?
“Having recently been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, with all the chemo and meds I’ve been placed on I felt my body needed something outside of medical science to help fight this terrible disease,” said Samuel P. “I found it in freshly squeezed wheatgrass. I’ve never felt so good in my body and my mind.”
“I started drinking wheatgrass four weeks ago,” Pam said, “and what a difference it has made! The first thing I noticed was my energy levels increased dramatically. Also, I have suffered from chronic leg cramps for 45 years, every night, and since I’ve been on the wheatgrass I have not had any cramps. It’s miraculous after suffering all these years!”
I’ve read dozens of accounts like that. Some of them are hard to believe, but hard-won beliefs are the kind that change lives.
We’ve been growing wheatgrass in the greenhouse at the farm for a month or so. The grass in the picture above is about ten days old, and what you see there is enough grass for maybe 70 servings of juice, like the one to the right, which I swallowed half an hour ago because I want to find out for myself. Luckily, I don’t need relief from any serious illness or affliction, but I am 55 years old, and I’m increasingly aware of my body’s pains and failings. I hope my awareness, and the fact that I’m not looking for any particular result, will make me a good test case.
For the last 27 minutes or so, I’ve been enjoying a state of intensified alertness: imagine drinking a lot of coffee fast without feeling jittery or wanting to bounce your leg. It’s like that. Mark Zurschmeide calls it energy, as Pam did above, and some of the sources I’ve read suggest that the energy comes from a sudden spike in your blood’s capacity to carry oxygen to your brain and throughout the rest of your body. Other sources dispute that claim, but It does feel like my brain is getting better air.
Since human stomachs don’t have the microbes required to dissolve the walls of the cells that contain the drop of precious liquid produced by a leaf of wheatgrass, you have to crush the leaves with a juicer, so my new life with wheatgrass started with a new machine. We chose the Omega 8006.
Tomorrow I plan to drink my shot before I exercise to see if it improves my endurance. I’ll let you know. In the meantime, have a look at our juicer.