There’s a juice bar by me that sells wheatgrass juice, along with all kinds of claims about it being the most nutritious food there is, and a quick google on wheatgrass turns up all kinds of places making similar claims, like that “one ounce of wheatgrass has as much nutrition as eating 2 1/2 lbs. of vegetables” and such. Most of these sites though are either chock full of all kinds of New Age-type stuff or else they are trying to sell wheatgrass seeds or pills or whatever. Anyone know anything about this? Is there any actual scientific information available on this stuff–it just seems like if it was really such a miracle food more people would have heard about it; the juice bar claims that drinking 1 oz. of this stuff each day will make me ridiculously healthy, help me lose weight, etc. It just seems like a shortcut to good health the way they are promoting it, and that’ s what makes me so suspicious, but I can’t turn up any real information on it so I turned to the Straight Dope.
Nope. It’s not bad for you but it certainly isn’t a superfood. Wheatgrass
thanks…just what I was looking for!
according to this pdf, it’s used to accelerate the degredation of Pentachlorophenol in the soil, so make sure your not getting your wheatgrass from a poluted site.
A quick search didn’t really turn up much, but that’s the nature of the claims made by the suppliment industry. They tend to find a new miracle fungi/root/food/mineral and everyone jumps in and pimps it as much as they possibly can. Eventually, the government steps in and debunks all the claims, but the companies have made the money they wanted to, and simply move onto the next junk science based miracle snake oil. See the Evolution of Ephedra, Saint John’s Wort, etc. for more history on the practice.