During the Great Depression, scientist Dr. Charles F. Schnabel fed his children the dried powder of whole leaf young cereal grass. He documented their resulting excellent health.

Schnabel planted wheatgrass on their farm in the fall of 1931. After a winter of slow growth in often-freezing temperatures, the plant went from a couple of inches tall in the fall to nearly eight inches tall in the spring of 1932 when it reached its maximum nutrition.

His scientific team found that cereal grass powder harvested at that period contained many times more vitamins than grocery store vegetables. They called their product Cerophyl. It became known as the “world’s first multivitamin.”

Although it consisted of only the young grasses of cereal grains, it was so loaded with nutrition that it became a household word. Nearly every pharmacy carried it.

Dr. Schnabel sent Cerophyl to doctors and hospitals. The results were phenomenal. Nearly 40 years later, Ann Wigmore and other authors praised Schnabel’s research in books about wheatgrass. One author called him “The Father of Wheatgrass.”

By 1960, synthetic vitamins had all but replaced Cerophyl. Pines brought it back in 1976 as Pines Wheat Grass, not as a multivitamin, but as a naturally concentrated source of dark green, leafy vegetable nutrition missing from many diets.

Now 45 years later, according to Pines, dozens of products copy their message but apply it to products containing many of the veggies that scientists had shown contain only a fraction of cereal grass nutrition.

That’s why a 3.5 gram serving of Pines Wheat Grass contains more green food nutrition than a 9-to-12-gram serving of “green” blends, the company stated.

Never sold in plastic, Pines packages all its products using the same oxygen-free, amber-glass bottles that Schnabel proved necessary to prevent the loss of valuable nutrients.

For more information, visit wheatgrass.com.