Myths About Wheatgrass

In discussing the myths about wheatgrass, it is necessary to look at the origin of the myths. This requires comparing indoor tray‐grown wheatgrass with whole food wheatgrass grown by Pines International under natural conditions. These comparisons are not meant to imply that people should not drink chlorophyll‐rich raw vegetable juices. There are plenty of reasons to drink raw vegetable juice, but in the long run, whole food raw vegetables such as Pines Wheat Grass, containing cellulose fiber and grown as nature intended, should be a staple in everyone’s diet.



The recent new USDA food plate, recommends that we eat more from the vegetable group than any other food group. Leafy greens are very important vegetables. The darker the green, the more nutrition they contain. The USDA recommends that the vegetables you eat be mostly whole foods, not juice, because research indicates the importance of vegetable fiber for colon health and the prevention of degenerative disease.

Juice has its place, but whole foods are what we are designed to eat. However, there is no reason why one cannot consume both vegetable juice and whole food vegetables as well. In fact, the more chlorophyll‐rich detoxifying antioxidant foods in your system the better. Most mammals similar to humans eat large quantities of dark, green leafy vegetables and so should you!

Because many humans do not eat enough green foods, they often obtain miraculous health results when they start including chlorophyll‐rich foods in their diet. Both a chlorophyll‐rich juice and the extremely high chlorophyll content of Pines Wheat Grass can produce very strong and beneficial results, especially for those whose bodies are craving green food nutrients. If you use Pines Wheat Grass each day, you may still want to drink vegetable juice, but if you are drinking juice without also providing your colon with chlorophyll‐rich roughage, you may not be getting the cellulose fiber of vegetables that is essential for colon health.

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MYTH #1. Wheatgrass grown in a tray is the same as Dr. Schnabel’s wheatgrass.

This myth began with Ann Wigmore, who wrote the first book about growing wheatgrass indoors in trays. Her bibliography contains references to Dr. Charles Schnabel, Dr. George Kohler and other scientists who conducted the original research on wheatgrass. Their research was not on wheatgrass grown in a tray in warm conditions and was not on juice. Their research was on hard red winter wheat, planted in the fall in Northeast Kansas and harvested the following spring after slow growth through the winter. It was then dried and milled as a whole food powder. A laboratory those scientists used for that research is owned and still used by Pines International. Further, Pines still uses many of the same fields of rich alluvial glacial soil that these scientists found produced the highest quality wheatgrass. These fields have been certified organic for more than 20 years.



Pines International also still uses the low-temperature drying method (although improved) that was developed by these scientists. In fact, Pines Wheat Grass is grown, harvested, dried and packaged in exactly the same manner as wheatgrass that was used in the research that inspired Wigmore to promote growing wheatgrass in a tray.

Ann Wigmore was a wonderful human being, who did more than any person in history to make people aware of the importance of raw foods for both health and healing, but she was not a farmer, scientist or objective researcher. She did not look deeper into the research to know the importance of growing wheatgrass through the winter and harvesting in the spring just before the jointing stage.  The jointing stage for winter wheat can only occur after more than 200 days of slow growth during the winter months in a climate like northeastern Kansas. She failed to recognize that the data she was using to support her ideas was data on dehydrated whole leaf powder from northeastern Kansas. She did not understand that when wheatgrass is grown indoors as she proposed, it is growing 20 times faster than nature intended, with seeds right next to each other, rather than an inch apart, in rows seven inches apart, as has been the practice by farmers for centuries.



Ann Wigmore made the incorrect assumption that growing wheatgrass in warm conditions for ten days was the same thing as growing it in fertile glacial soil for 200 days through the winter. Although other authors such as Viktoras Kulvinskas and Steve Meyerowitz have acknowledged she was wrong, people still quote Ann Wigmore’s that one should use only the juice of her indoor‐grown wheatgrass. Wigmore mistakenly applied the research on dehydrated wheatgrass powder from the rich glacial soils of northeast Kansas, grown as nature intended, to wheatgrass grown unnaturally in trays, often with no soil at all. Further, she then sometimes mistakenly put down the wheatgrass that provided the impressive medical research that she used as a basis for promoting growing wheatgrass in very unnatural conditions.

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MYTH #2: Whole food wheatgrass contains cellulose and cannot be properly digested by humans

This myth is sometimes stated by over‐zealous proponents of indoor wheatgrass juice and other cereal grass juice products. They falsely claim that wheatgrass must be consumed as a juice because whole food wheatgrass contains “indigestible” cellulose. They fail to mention that whole food wheatgrass is not the only vegetable containing cellulose. Other cellulose vegetables include celery, broccoli, bean sprouts, alfalfa sprouts, green beans, potatoes, carrots, parsnips, cucumber, squash, zucchini, pumpkin and just about every vegetable that has ever been grown.

It is true that humans do not have a digestive tract designed to digest the cellulose itself, but our systems depend on the cellulose in plants to keep our colons functioning properly. If we lived on a diet of juices, our colons would shrink and that would not be good. The vitamins, minerals, phytonutrients, enzymes, etc. that are contained in vegetables are fully digestible when you eat whole food vegetables. In fact, cellulose in vegetables promotes the digestion of vegetable nutrients by slowing the transit time in the intestinal tract. There is nothing better for the colon than chlorophyll‐rich roughage. It detoxifies and provides the perfect medium for the friendly probiotic bacteria that are essential for a healthy colon. Instead of impeding digestion, cellulose improves digestion.



Although it is true that some nutrients in juice (especially the sugars) are more quickly assimilated, the cellulose from which the juice was extracted is equally important for health, and the nutrients contained in the cellulose are fully assimilated by the human digestive tract.

Pines International mills its wheatgrass much finer than anyone can chew any vegetable. This makes Pines Wheat Grass as easy to assimilate as any vegetable pureed in a blender. The bottom line is that for 85 years, wheatgrass grown, harvested and dehydrated just like Pines Wheat Grass has produced a phenomenal body of research and thousands of personal testimonials from people who believe they obtained real results. Obviously, the nutrients in whole food wheatgrass are fully assimilated.

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MYTH #3: Tray wheatgrass juice provides better nutrition than true wheatgrass powder.

Steve Meyerowitz is known as “the sproutman” and is obviously biased toward growing wheatgrass and sprouts indoors, but Steve is also a responsible and intellectually honest man who spent time and funds to compare dehydrated whole food wheatgrass powder with tray‐grown wheatgrass juice in his book, Wheat Grass: Nature’s Finest Medicine.

The nutritional analysis in his book shows that the protein content for one serving of Pines Wheat Grass can contain as much as twice the protein as an ounce of tray‐grown juice. This fact makes sense when you notice that Steve’s data also shows that wheatgrass grown indoors has many times more sugar than wheatgrass grown naturally and harvested at the appropriate time. Photosynthesis is the process chlorophyll in plants use to capture the energy of sunlight to convert water and carbon dioxide into a simple carbohydrate (sugar), but it takes time for the plant to convert those simple carbohydrates into more complex nutrients such as the amino acids that make up the perfect protein in wheatgrass. During more than 200 days of slow growth under natural cold weather conditions, true wheatgrass produces sugar, too, but with time and the slow growth over the winter, sugar is used to build amino acids and other complex nutrients.



The reason many people drink wheatgrass juice is because they want the well known detoxifying effects of chlorophyll. Yet, Steve’s data shows that a serving of Pines Wheat Grass provides as much as four times more chlorophyll than a “shot” of tray‐grown. If you take the recommended three servings per day of Pines Wheat Grass, you would receive as much as 12 times more chlorophyll than you would with a daily “shot” of tray‐grown juice.

The fact that tray wheatgrass is not as concentrated in chlorophyll as Pines Wheat Grass is not surprising. You can see the obvious difference in color between tray wheatgrass and a wheatgrass grown as nature intended. Tray wheatgrass is very pale by comparison. True wheatgrass is a deep vibrant green. The deeper the green color, the more chlorophyll that is present. Again, slow growth in cold weather is what makes the difference. Chlorophyll production is stimulated by sunlight.



The longer a plant is exposed to sunlight, the darker green it becomes. Pines Wheat Grass is grown for more than 200 days outdoors in cold weather, and much of that time is in direct sunlight. Compare that to growing wheatgrass under artificial lights in your kitchen for 10 days, and you should understand why Pines Wheat Grass has four times more chlorophyll than tray‐grown.

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MYTH #4: The mold in tray-grown wheatgrass are caused by “dirty seeds.”

The hard red winter wheat seeds that most people use for tray‐grown wheatgrass are harvested from winter wheat that was grown naturally for more than 200 days outdoors through the winter in a climate like Kansas. Wheatgrass grown indoors in warm conditions will never produce seed and contains mold and elevated levels of bacteria. Some “urban wheatgrass farmers” blame the seed for causing the mold and bacteria in their wheatgrass, but they are wrong.

A few years ago, Pines purchased some of the best wheatgrass growing equipment available. Pines had planned to provide dehydrated tray‐grown wheatgrass for those who were convinced that growing it indoors for ten days was superior to growing it outdoors as nature intended.

Since Pines has its own laboratory and tests its products at every stage of production and packaging, the laboratory tested the tray‐grown wheatgrass, too. Mold had never been a problem for Pines naturally‐grown wheatgrass because it grows in weather that is too cold for mold to grow. When the tray wheatgrass was tested, the mold levels were extremely high. The bacteria levels were also much higher than the outdoor‐grown wheatgrass. They were even higher than algae products, which characteristically have bacteria levels that are a hundred times or more greater than Pines Wheat Grass. The tray‐grown wheatgrass Pines produced in its greenhouse looked beautiful. The mold and bacteria were not visible. They could only be detected with laboratory analysis.



Pines employees scrubbed and scrubbed the seeds but kept getting the same results. They tried rinsing the seeds and trays with vinegar, but mold and the high bacteria levels were still a problem. They even tried ammonia and concentrated bleach, but the results were the same. The reason for the mold and elevated bacteria counts in tray‐grown wheatgrass is not because of dirt on seeds that did not germinate. It is because of the greenhouse conditions.

No matter how clean your kitchen or greenhouse may be, mold spores and bacteria are everywhere waiting for the right environment. Tray‐grown wheatgrass grows in exactly the kind of warm, humid conditions that mold and bacteria love. To make matters worse, “urban farmers” crowd their wheat seeds right next to each other. Professional wheat farmers plant their seeds an inch apart in rows that are seven inches apart. Farmers have grown wheat that way for thousands of years. Instead of the roots spreading out as nature intended, the roots for tray‐grown wheatgrass are crowded in a tangled maze that very quickly becomes loaded with high levels of mold and bacteria.

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MYTH #5: If you feel nauseous after drinking tray-grown juice, your body is detoxifying

Actually, the reason for nausea is more likely caused by the high sugar content combined with the toxicity of the bacteria and mold that accompanies wheatgrass grown in unnatural conditions, not detoxification by the wheatgrass. Commercial tray wheatgrass growers and suppliers often play down the mold and bacteria in tray wheatgrass, claiming it is not harmful and is simply caused by spores and bacteria on seeds that do not germinate. When someone has a reaction, it is often written off, not as an allergic reaction, but rather the result of a “healing crisis” or “detoxification.”