Geschatte leestijd: 3 minutenThe superfood Wheatgrass is seen as a miracle cure. That’s immediately a good reason to look at it critically. The claim that it contains more nutrients than a few kilos of vegetables is incomprehensible for a healthy thinking person. If that were true, and proven, why isn’t wheatgrass even more popular than it already is?
Is it true?
Wheatgrass is not a miracle cure. The first reason to conclude this is that there are no miracle cures at all. No matter how hard we search for the fountain of youth, there are no shortcuts to health.
Clear enough, but why not?
The claim of wheatgrass is that it contains as many, or more, nutrients (or foodstuffs) as 1-2 kilos of vegetables (depending on which pro-wheatgrass book you read). That’s a strange statement in various ways.
Which vegetable
Firstly, you might wonder which vegetable is meant. There are thousands of types of vegetables. With which is wheatgrass compared? In such generalities, you need to be cautious. Naturally, such a statement is true if you take nutrient-poor vegetables. But such a statement is also definitively untrue if you take one and a half kilos of broccoli or one and a half kilos of raw carrots.
“In the ditch behind my house swim more fish than in 200,000 square kilometers of ocean.”
The above statement is also true if you compare the ditch behind your house with combined places in the ocean where there happen to be no fish swimming.
Nutrients
The term nutrients is too general for the statement. Because it refers to more than 50 different substances that help our body with bodily processes: both macronutrients (proteins, carbohydrates, and fats) and micronutrients (minerals, vitamins, and trace elements). Therefore, the claim x contains more nutrients than y is a bit weird.
Of course, we are not all very dumb and can imagine that macronutrients are not meant. There are not so many of them in a 30ml shot glass. But even when comparing micronutrients, we come to the conclusion that 30 ml of wheatgrass juice, for example, contains less vitamin E, vitamin C, magnesium, iron, calcium, and potassium than 200 grams of broccoli or 200 grams of raw carrots.
So, the claim is doubly worthless: it is not specific and also untrue. Wheatgrass does not contain more nutrients than a few kilos of vegetables.
Why is wheatgrass still drunk?
Why wheatgrass is still popular is easy to explain. Shots are sold for at least two euros, suggesting that it is an effective remedy. After all, everything that is alarmingly more expensive than ‘normal food’ must be healthy food. That’s the general opinion.
And of course, wheatgrass contains relatively many micronutrients, but there is no reason to take it instead of one and a half kilo of vegetables.
Miracle cure
The falsely attributed properties of wheatgrass stem from our search for shortcuts to health. We are lazy and want to do as little as possible to achieve the largest possible result. That is very logical and that makes us as a species very successful, but with 30ml of wheatgrass juice, you do not become a better person. A daily shot will also not make much difference. Only if your diet otherwise (in terms of micronutrients) is of little value, will wheatgrass juice be a good addition. But even in that situation, it’s better to focus on adjusting your overall diet, rather than a small plaster on the wound.
Chlorophyll
Then there’s the claim that the chlorophyll in wheatgrass, chlorophyll, (depending on which source you use) is converted into hemoglobin or functions the same as hemoglobin, which is responsible for the transport of oxygen and carbon dioxide in the blood. First of all, the question is why it is better to have more hemoglobin (or similar substances) in our blood. Additionally, research shows that chlorophyll is hardly absorbed in our body because we lack the enzymes that make this possible.
Conclusion
The properties attributed to wheatgrass and wheatgrass juice are exaggerated and therefore untrue. Wheatgrass certainly contains high concentrations of minerals and vitamins but does not stand head and shoulders above other vegetables.
What we can learn from these bizarre claims is that we are easily fooled. We are all looking for quick fixes for health. These have not been found, apart from surgical procedures.
Feel free to keep drinking < strong>wheatgrass if you like doing so. But don’t buy into the bizarre health claims.
A shot of wheatgrass is, by the way, still a bit better than a shot of tequila.
