Friday, August 8, 2008

Why Am I Being So Hard On Wheatgrass?

I just got this comment in my last post on the subject. I've provided a handy link to a website called "What's The Harm?" that will show you why I care about this stuff.

However, in an effort to get this horse to drink some water, I guess I'll have to do more than just lead it to the lake. Consider this the metaphorical equivalent of holding water to the horse's mouth:

The 13-year-old, the youngest of four children, has a genetic disease that interferes with her kidneys and breathing. Two of her brothers also have the condition, which has only been documented 39 times in the past 50 years.

She was taken from her mother by a youth court judge in February because her mother had placed her on a regime of wheat-grass juice and raw foods and was withholding a medication. Judge Judith Landry found that the mother had watched her daughter's health deteriorate over a period of months and ruled that custody be temporarily transferred to the teen's father.

I'm hard on wheatgrass because it leads to situations exactly like this. People think they can use this snake oil instead of real medicine and it causes harm and death. If you want to do shots of wheatgrass that's your business, but stop telling people that it does anything except provide a fraction of the nutrition of a spinach salad until you can prove otherwise.

And on the subject of raw food...

1 comment:

Q said...

Snake Oil << Science

If wheat grass could make you immortal, there would already be wheat grass drinking highlanders running around amongst us cutting off each others' heads a drinking the rarefied, concentrated wheat grass from the still spurting stumps of their fallen victims as they move towards their inevitable apotheosis when one immortal possesses the power of all the wheat grass in the universe.

hmmmm...*muses*