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Dr. Ann Wigmore

Ann Wigmore was born in 1909 in Lithuania. At the age of 13 Ann sailed to America aboard the ship USS America, and arrived at Ellis Island on December 9, 1922. No one knew then that Ann would someday single-handedly change the science of nutrition forever with her ground breaking discoveries, and would unlock the secrets of health long before science would be capable of proving her theories correct. Today, many of Ann Wigmore’s theories are accepted as common knowledge, though in her day, her groundbreaking ideas cut a path through an untamed wilderness.

It all began when as a young woman, Ann Wigmore was diagnosed with gangrene. Gangrene is a potentially life-threatening condition that arises when a considerable mass of body tissue dies. The primary cause of gangrene is reduced blood supply to the affected tissues, which results in cell death. Gangrene is essentially the slow decomposition of one’s body while one is still alive. The affected area will often become dry, shrunken and dark reddish-black, resembling mummified flesh. One of Ann’s legs was badly infected and needed to be amputated to keep the gangrene from spreading. In her many books and journals, Ann Wigmore reported feeling terribly sad about this. She refused surgery, saying that she would rather die than become handicapped. Eventually the adults relented to her persistent refusal of treatment, and let her be. One morning, Ann Wigmore asked to be carried out into the garden. She was placed on a bench and left to her own thoughts. Ann Wigmore sat alone in gloomy despair and was feeling very depressed indeed, until she observed a most peculiar event taking place. The neighborhood cat that had been very sick the week before, ran out onto the lawn and began eating the grass underfoot! Ann Wigmore reached down thoughtfully, and plucked a blade of grass herself. She placed it in her mouth and slowly ate it. Then she reached down, and picked another. For several weeks Ann Wigmore came out into the garden each day, and ate as many blades of grass as she could. Gradually, her leg regained its prior healthy color and before long, Ann Wigmore had cured herself from gangrene!

It wasn’t long before Ann Wigmore had found a way to grow wheatgrass in trays and juice the thick green blades into a powerful elixir of health. It is important to note here, that the healing power of wheatgrass is not so much a feature of the grass itself, but rather attributed to the high concentration of chlorophyll in this plant. In fact all green plants have powerful healing properties because they all contain chlorophyll. Ann Wigmore was among the first to make the correlation between green plants and human health. She soon became a holistic health practitioner, nutritionist, whole foods advocate, and health educator. Ann Wigmore wrote over fifteen books. She distributed over one million copies of these books, and lectured in thirty-five countries. Dr. Ann Wigmore was one of the most significant contributors to the raw food lifestyle to date. Dr. Ann wrote detailed accounts of the greatest value about the most fundamental issues concerning the raw and living foods lifestyle. Dr. Ann discovered the miraculous healing benefits of wheatgrass juice, she invented rejuvelac, energy soup, nut and seed milks, the first dehydrated crackers, growing sprouts in trays and mesh bags, and many more ingenious ideas.

Dr. Ann Wigmore was so passionate about helping people who were suffering from diseases that she did not think about the destiny of all her manuscripts and other research papers. On February 16, 1994, at the age of 85, Dr. Ann Wigmore died of smoke inhalation from entering a burning building. Her books, tapes, and other treasures that she had created during her life stopped being widely published. Many of them quickly became forgotten or lost.

As a researcher of natural lifestyle, I attempted to read as many of Dr. Ann Wigmore’s books and manuscripts as possible. I was saddened when I would find some of her valuable tapes and papers stockpiled in storage, collecting dust and quickly deteriorating. Some of Dr. Ann’s work is already lost forever. That is why I was so delighted to hear about the initiative coming from people in Dr. Ann’s home country to retrieve and protect her heritage, and to make Dr. Ann’s teachings available to all people. That was Ann Wigmore’s dream, to spread the message of natural health worldwide.

In 1996 I visited the Creative Health Institute, founded by Ann Wigmore in Michigan USA, and while I lived there for nine months with my husband and children, I thoroughly researched wheatgrass juice, sprouting, energy soup, and sauerkraut. I quickly discovered that wheatgrass was quite difficult to drink due to its strong alkaloids, and that many patients would not continue making energy soup at home due to its bland flavor. This struck me as most unfortunate, and I wanted to resolve these issues so that more people could benefit from Ann Wigmore’s discoveries.

After years of study, I came to the conclusion that consuming plentiful amounts of any greens would result in the same miraculous healing effects one would observe from drinking wheatgrass juice. I am delighted to have continued Dr. Ann Wigmore’s research, and to have helped spread the good news about the healing power of chlorophyll. In 2004 I discovered a way to make consuming greens delicious for everyone by blending greens and fruit together in the form of green smoothies. Today, I would like to raise my glass of green smoothie in honor of Dr. Ann Wigmore, and all of her incredible work!