“The food you eat can be either the safest and most powerful form of medicine or the slowest form of poison.” – Ann Wigmore
About Ann Wigmore
Ann Wigmore (1909 – 1994) was a Lithuanian–American “holistic health” practitioner and raw food advocate. Wigmore wrote several books on her theories and lectured widely to promote her practices.
Wigmore was born Anna Marie Warapicki in Lithuania on March 4, 1909 to Antanas (1877-1959) and Anna (1882-?) Warapicki. Antanas emigrated to America in 1908, settling in Middleboro, Massachusetts, where he first worked as a laborer in a shoe manufacturing company, then later as a truck driver for a bakery during Wigmore’s American teen-age years.
Wigmore was inspired in part by the ideas of Maximilian Bircher-Benner (1867 – 1939), who was influenced as a young man by the German Lebensreform movement, which saw civilization as corrupt and which sought to go “back to nature”; it embraced holistic medicine, nudism, various forms of spirituality, free love, exercise and other outdoors activity, and foods that it judged were more “natural”. Bircher-Benner eventually adopted a vegetarian diet, but took that further and decided that raw food was what humans were really meant to eat; he was influenced by Charles Darwin’s ideas that humans were just another kind of animal and Bircher-Benner noted that other animals do not cook their food.
Wigmore was one of the first to popularize these ideas about raw food in the US. In the 1940s Wigmore started promoting the benefits of wheatgrass and other raw foods in order to “detox”, removing what she considered to be poisons of “unnatural” cooked foods and food additives added by industrial society; she believed this diet allowed and helped the body to heal itself.
Wigmore also founded the Ann Wigmore Natural Health Institute Inc in Puerto Rico, where people could go for alternative medicine or to be trained in her methods.
Wigmore died in Boston on February 16, 1994, of smoke inhalation from a fire at the Ann Wigmore Foundation building at 196 Beacon Street.[18] She had written about twenty five books and had lectured on her ideas in the US, Canada, and Europe. The Foundation moved to New Mexico after Wigmore’s death; it lost IRS accreditation as a nonprofit in 2012.
(Source – Wikipedia)