Monday, August 18, 2008
Tuesday, August 12, 2008
Why Wheatgrass?
Wheatgrass is part of the common wheat plant used often after its properties are liquefied through a juicer, or dried into a powder. It contains chlorophyll, amino acids, minerals, enzymes and vitamins. Many have called it a complete food in and of itself. Its curative properties have been applauded by many who have spread the word and increased interest in the phenomenon of adding wheatgrass shots to drinks, or taking them as a pure shot. Though available at most juicerbars in one form or another, it can also be grown and juiced at home.
Wheatgrass is said to have a bitter taste if there is an imbalance in the person consuming it, but overtime, wheatgrass consumers say the bitter taste becomes a sweet taste.
It is also said that 1 ounce of wheatgrass is the equivalent of 1kg of green vegetables. It is an aid for improving digestion, curing constipation, detoxifying heavy metals from the blood, preventing cancer, promoting general well-being, and helping to ease menopause, in addition to preventing diabetes and heart diease.
Cultivation & Usage
(From Wikipedia)
Schnabel's research was conducted with wheatgrass grown outdoors in Kansas. His wheatgrass required 200 days of slow growth, through the winter and early spring, when it was harvested at the jointing or reproductive stage. It was at this stage that the plant reached its peak nutritional potential; after jointing, concentrations of chlorophyll, protein, and vitamin decline sharply. [1] Harvested grass was dehydrated and made into powders and tablets for human and animal consumption. Wheatgrass grown indoors in trays for ten days contains similar nutritional content. Wheatgrass grown outdoors is harvested, dehydrated at a low temperature and sold in tablet and powdered forms. Wheat grass juice powder (fresh squeezed with the water removed) is also available either spray-dried or freeze-dried.
The average dosage taken by consumers of wheatgrass is 3.5 grams (powder or tablets). Some also have a fresh-squeezed 30 ml shot once daily or for more therapeutic benefits a higher dose up to 2–4 oz taken 1-3 times per day on an empty stomach and before meals. For detoxification, some users may increase their intake to 3–4 times per day. It should be noted that consumers with a poor diet may experience nausea on high dosages of wheatgrass. Outdoor wheatgrass is harvested for a few days each year from plants grown in the "bread basket" regions of the US and Canada. Winter wheat requires more than 200 days of slow growth in cold temperatures to reach the peak nutritional content. Even after that length of time, the plant is only 7 to 10 inches high.
The Benefits Of Juicing
The trend couldn’t come at a better time. Recently, the National Cancer Institute began a campaign to get people to do one simple thing – EAT MORE FRUITS AND VEGETABLES. Specifically, the recommendation was to eat five servings
of fruit and three servings of vegetables a day, and their reasoning was simple:
a diet high in fruits and vegetables will prevent or cure a wide range of ailments.
Many of us have relatively compromised intestines as a result of poor food choices over many years. This limits our bodies ability to absorb all the nutrients from the vegetables and juicing tends to facilitate this absorption. Also, vegetable juicing allows you to eat more of the vegetables than you normally would otherwise. By incorporating the juice into your healing diet you will easily be able to reach the roughly one pound of raw vegetables per fifty pounds of body weight that is generally recommended we should eat every day.
Consuming nothing but fresh, diluted juices from various fruits and vegetables for a day or more is a safe and helpful form of fasting. I believe that juice fasting actually works better than a straight water fast, because it helps to eliminate wastes, old or dead cells while building new tissues with the easily accessible nutrients from the juices. The more drastic water fast is the more intense, often resulting in more sickness and less energy, than fasting with fruit and vegetable juices.
Breast cancer, cancer of the colon, esophagus, stomach, lungs ovaries, and rectum – pick and ailment these days, it seems, and researchers somewhere are searching for chemicals in plants that will prevent them, or offer a cure. These plant chemicals, known as phytochemicals, are the cutting edge of nutritional research because they hold the keys to preventing some of our most deadly diseases, such as a cancer and heart disease, as well as some of our most common, like asthma, arthritis, and allergies.
