Revisit the Past to Move to the Future

wheatgrass in small tray at 6 days

Over forty years ago, a visionary holistic practitioner, Ann Wigmore, postulated that our modern diet of "convenience food" was the prime cause of illness and obesity. She was the pioneer who brought wheatgrass and raw foods to the attention of health and wellness seekers.

Ann founded the Hippocrates Health Institute and became an internationally acclaimed holistic health educator. Through these venues she taught that what we eat profoundly affects our health. Through a diet of fresh fruits, vegetables, grains, and nuts, combined with nutritious sprouts and wheatgrass juice, the body is able to restore its internal balance. This also restores its capacity to maintain a healthy weight, fight disease, and heal itself.

Around the same time Dr Maynard Murray was doing work with sea solids. In his groundbreaking book published in 1976, “Sea Energy Agriculture”, Dr Murray verified one of Ann's hypotheses that our modern diet lacked an essential ingredient because our food was being grown in increasingly "barren" fields. What his work showed was that natural plant and animal growth depended on simple trace elements that were deposited on land from the seas.

Modern farming, with its increasing reliance on fertilizers and chemicals, has stripped much of the trace minerals from our land and the food we grow. Modern fertilizers focus on increasing yields and appearance to the detriment of healthy produce. Studies have shown that the trace minerals normally found in topsoil has been stripped or seriously depleted by the use of modern fertilizers and chemicals. This leads to our increasingly nutrient deficient food.

Many of the key nutrients in modern food is lost through industrial farming, with its focus on looks over quality. Produce is often picked unripe, and shipped hundreds of miles to reach consumers. Nutrient content starts to degrade as soon as crops are harvested and continues through processing and transport. Shipping not only increases fossil fuel use but compromises the nutrient values of our food. Our modern, industrial farming produces "pretty" displays, but empty food.

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In 1992, Dr Paul Talalay, who directs the Laboratory for Molecular Pharmacology at Johns Hopkins, provided scientific evidence to some of Ann's early thoughts of healing with live foods. He isolated a compound in broccoli sprouts that was found to combat cancer. The finding was so significant that the US Patent Office gave him a patent on the sprouts (subsequently taken away because patenting common plants is not within the scope of the office). This led to a modern study by researchers at the University of Maryland, who found that baby plants called microgreens contained significantly higher levels (4-40 times) of key nutrients than mature vegetables.

Diets and health products flood the markets today claiming miracle cures. Most failures happen simply because the regimens prescribed require such great changes to our normal habits that they are doomed to fail. It seems that there is great wisdom in the work of the those early health pioneers. Adopting habits based on this can only help to stem some of the ills brought on by our modern convenient diets and processed foods.

I was drawn on this journey by observing a seemingly inert sponge used as media to grow a vibrant vertical wall at a large trade show in Boston. The growth astounded me and prompted extensive research into what may have caused this seemingly impossible growth. This search led me to these seemingly disparate entities that all made sense in context of what may be going on. I experimented with various elements and found source products that are true to the early work of these pioneers and that were natural in origin. Sourcing from Nature always seems to come back to prove how brilliant mother nature is.
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We will be introducing our Qi or life force products based on this discussion later this week. We wil start with our Qi mix which was an Ann Wigmore staple with a twist. Watch for product announcements to follow.
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