wheatgrass juicing problem

[Guest guest]

I just bought a manual wheatgrass juicer and am not impressed. I

bought a flat of grass for $5 and juiced the whole thing and only got

3 oz. Whole foods sells the juice at $1.75/oz. I thought I would be

saving money? I'm not sure what to think. Do the electric juicers

yield more juice per flat?

[Guest guest]

I got a wheatgrass juicer off ebay, you know, the expeller type, with the

same plans as you: get a flat or two of the wheatgrass from a

grower/supplier and do a shot every day. Funny thing is, I'm still trying to

get use to the shots I'm getting over at Wild Oats. I find the wheat grass

to be a stomach turner, but I'm bound and determined to stick it out until I

adapt to it. I know it's good even if it kills me. :>)

 

But to answer your question, while I haven't put wheatgrass through my

juicer yet, I have put spinach and it works extremely well. I get a lot of

juice/slime/foam from just a small amount of spinach leafs and I put that

into my veggie juice.

 

The wheat grass is really like medicine, I think.

 

Jesse

Connecticut

 

-

" votefornader9 " <votefornader9

<rawfood >

Wednesday, June 23, 2004 11:49 PM

[Raw Food] wheatgrass juicing problem

 

 

> I just bought a manual wheatgrass juicer and am not impressed. I

> bought a flat of grass for $5 and juiced the whole thing and only got

> 3 oz. Whole foods sells the juice at $1.75/oz. I thought I would be

> saving money? I'm not sure what to think. Do the electric juicers

> yield more juice per flat?

[Guest guest]

rawfood , " studio53 " <studio53@s...> wrote:

> I find the wheat grass

> to be a stomach turner, but I'm bound and determined to stick it

out until I

> adapt to it. I know it's good even if it kills me. :>)

>

> The wheat grass is really like medicine, I think.

 

We are taught all our lives to believe in the medical paradigm,

which tells us that everything that is good for us tastes awful. But

the truth is just the opposite! Nothing that tastes awful to us or

makes us feel bad can be good for us. Our senses collectively

comprise the first of the portals of our bodies--the doorways which

open or close to substances entering. Look at how animals, who have

not been indoctrinated, approach their food--they look at it, they

smell it, if it passes the sniff test then they taste it. If it

tastes good, they will eat it. Otherwise they reject it.

 

The second portal is the stomach. If the body finds something

objectionable, it will attempt to send it back up. These are the

means that the body uses to try to keep out things that are toxic

and/or incompatible with our physiology. The final portal is the

body's evacuating the objectionable food via diarrhea, if the

offending substance has managed to get past the stomach, then the

body rushes it through and out. Actually, the entire digestive

system is considered to be " outside " of the body, the actual body

being the inner organs, so that the digestive system can take

in/keep out/process foods, and only send what is truly nutritive to

the inner organs and blood stream.

 

Wheatgrass juice was popularized by Ann Wigmore, who wrote a

wonderful little book called " Why Suffer? " This book, which you can

find used copies of easily, gives her history. Ann was from eastern

Europe, and was raised in her childhood by a grandmother who loved

her and was an herbalist. Then Ann came to the U.S. at around age 16

to rejoin her parents, who were not very nice to her. At one point,

she was severely injured, I believe she was in a horse-drawn cart.

Doctors told her they would have to amputate her legs or she would

die of the gangrene that she had. She refused, and everyone,

including her family, turned their back on her. So everyone left her

alone, and she was able to rest in solitude and peace. It was

summertime, and she lay in the sun on a lounge chair for weeks.

 

As she lay there, her hand dangled and brushed up against the grass

that grew around her. She began to suck on the blades of grass a

little. Ann recovered fully, her gangrene gone, her legs totally

healed. Unfortunately, and mistakenly, Ann assigned her spectacular

healing to the blades of grass! Instead of to the miraculous healing

powers of her body, which she cooperated with by giving it fresh

air, sunshine, peace and quiet and total rest, and lack of food. Ann

had been essentially fasting, and the little bit of grass that she

sucked on was not significant to interfere with her healing.

 

Unfortunately, just like the rest of us, Ann had been brought up

with the same medical paradigm, that the body is powerless, and is

not capable of action, and that the magic is not in the body, but

instead in substances. So naturally, she attributed the magic to the

bit of grass she sucked on--there had to be some supernatural magic

in them! When of course instead it was her body that healed itself,

given the conditions of life, and allowed to fast, total rest, and

essentially abstinence from food and activity.

 

Reasoning that there was magic in the grass, she experimented with

different types of grass, and I think because it was more

concentrated than the other types of grass, she began to advocate

it. And with the same idea that we are brought up with, that more is

better, she reasoned that more of the concentrated nutrients in the

grass, the better, so she set up huge wheatgrass growing and juicing

operations, and of course everyone who is looking for the next magic

substance as we are taught to do, happily embraced wheatgrass.

 

People wonder why wheatgrass tastes awful, and why they are

nauseated from it, and why if it's so good for them as everyone

tells them--why it makes them feel so yucky. But they obey the

mandate to juice wheatgrass, just as they follow so many of the

things they are told to do by those who are considered gurus and

experts in the raw food movement. But there is no magic in

wheatgrass or in anything else.

 

Grass is a plant, and it has toxins in it to keep it from being

eaten, as do all plants. Grass is rather low in toxicity, however,

provided we eat the grass. When we eat plants--vegetables--they have

roughage, fiber, and goodies, to mitigate the toxins in them, plus

we can't eat enough of it to harm us. I have eaten some grasses that

volunteer in my yard, and they tasted wonderful, but interestingly

they were quite filling, so there was no danger of overeating. The

toxins are concentrated in the liquid in the plant, which is what we

get when we juice them. There is not a lot of liquid in plants, so

we have to juice a lot of them to get any juice. We would never be

able to eat anywhere as much of a plant and get as much of its

juice, as we get when we juice a ton of it.

 

Fruits, on the other hand, are made by the plants specifically for

us to eat them. Most fruits are completely compatible with our

bodies, do not have significant amounts of toxins, and may be juiced

without problem--fruits are by far the least toxic of anything we

can eat. Additionally, juice has a high water content--we need far

less of it to get juice than we do of vegetables. But even with

fruit, it's best to eat the whole food rather than juicing them. We

need to eat whole foods in order to get the nutrition from them.

People who live on juice diets (sometimes they call them " juice

fasts " ) for long periods, such as months or even years at a time,

are essentially starving themselves of nutrition. We cannot improve

on Nature. We can improve soil by adding lost minerals into the

soil; we can water, we can propagate, but we still need to eat the

whole food as made by Nature, if we are to get fully nurtured.

 

So what we get when we juice wheatgrass, is lots of toxins. That is

why our bodies feel yucky when we drink it. Additionally, what are

we getting when we juice wheatgrass? Wheatgrass is grown in trays,

indoors. It's not getting the minerals from soil in Nature, it can

only get the limited nutriments that are in the little bit of soil

in the tray. It's not getting kissed by the wind and the morning dew

and other forces of Nature. It's not outside basking in the sun,

undergoing the photosynthesis of nutrients. There are no wheatgrass

juicers in Nature. The whole process of wheatgrass growing and

juicing is completely artificial and unnatural, and counter to

health.

 

I have only had wheatgrass juice twice in my life. The first time

was a year or so after going raw, I felt uncomfortable after I drank

it, and it didn't taste good to me. Yet, after another year or two,

stronger in my regained health, I was game enough to try it again.

That second time, I felt nauseated afterwards, and I had a

performance in a few hours. I had thought it would " energize " me.

Instead, I felt so weak and sick from it, I had to lie down for 2

hours, and barely had enough strength to drag myself through the

performance. That is a toxic reaction.

 

I used to be able to drink veggie juices when I first went raw, and

of course before I went raw. But as my body got stronger and

cleaner, it rejected the veggie juices as well--feeling nauseated

and weak and ill from drinking it. In fact, I used to drink

apple/carrot/celery, but it got so that even a little bit of celery

in the juice made me ill. I can still drink carrot without strong

adverse reaction, go figure--I think it's because it's so sweet and

mild--but I seldom drink it, it's not something I'm particularly

attracted to.

 

Wheatgrass probably won't kill you, your body is probably too strong

and healthy for that. In fact, the healthier we are, the more

intensely our bodies will reject that which is objectionable to

them. But putting into the body that which the body is clearly

telling us it does not want, will definitely impair our health. The

body probably will eventually stop fighting against the substance—

the body cannot devote all its energies forever to trying to warn us

to stop ingesting it, so the body eventually accommodates. Just as

it accommodated to the SAD diet in the first place—when we were

babies, if we were breastfed and then were weaned onto the SAD diet,

our bodies put up a huge fuss, in the form of childhood diseases,

but they eventually stopped and resigned themselves to the toxic

substances coming in, and tried to deal with them the best they

could.

 

My advice? Forget the wheatgrass, and everything else that doesn't

taste wonderful. Eat what you love. That which is good for us is

beautiful, delicious, simple, and we eat it the way it comes in

Nature. And we don't feel sick after we eat it, we feel nothing but

the absence of hunger after we eat. Listen to your body, not to

those who think they know better. We are children of Nature, as are

all animals, and the foods which belong in our bodies are inviting,

appealing. Real nutrition is not an ordeal; instead it is the

opposite. It is a joy, and we feel loved and nurtured when we eat

our natural foods, in harmony with our sense of well being.

 

Zsuzsa

[Guest guest]

I myself have just purchased a manual juicer and i find it takes a lot of

grass just to get a little bit of juice. But one thing I do is just juice

the grass that is growing in my yard. All grasses are good. Read this article

at this web site for more information about grasses

http://www.tuberose.com/Grasses.html Just because wheatgrass may be the best

doesn't mean the other grasses are no good. About a month ago i took some grass

that was growing in my yard and rubbed it in my hand for one minute and my

hand became soft as a babys behind and I ain't pulling your leg.

Nicholas Costanza

 

votefornader9 <votefornader9 wrote:

I just bought a manual wheatgrass juicer and am not impressed. I

bought a flat of grass for $5 and juiced the whole thing and only got

3 oz. Whole foods sells the juice at $1.75/oz. I thought I would be

saving money? I'm not sure what to think. Do the electric juicers

yield more juice per flat?