I very recently bought a copy of Barley Grass Juice by Barbara Simonsohn and have read just the first few pages. I have already learned a lot about barley grass, either the juice or the powder, in those few pages.
In the introduction the author shares that she learned about barley grass many years ago from a man named David who was juicing barley grass every day to deal with the symptoms of stomach cancer. As long as he drank a little of the juice every day he had no symptoms. That’s pretty cool. I heard from a friend that it helped him with his sensitive stomach, but stomach cancer is a whole different level.
I want to share just a little bit that this book says about barley grass.
“In Japan, barley grass powder is already the most popular food supplement.” I think just about everyone knows that the Japanese are among the healthiest people on our planet. Maybe there’s a connection?
Dr. Yoshihide Hagiwara, the man famous for barley grass, called barley grass powder “nature’s best fast food.” Just mix the powder with water and drink. You can’t get much easier than that.
This is the caption next to a picture of a small girl holding a handful of barley grass. “A supply of vital substances like barley grass juice (or extract) protects our children against disease and provides their bodies with everything that they need to strengthen its defensive and self-healing powers.”
She goes on to talk about how whole foods are more “biologically available” than synthetic vitamins. This is largely due to the fact that synthetic vitamins don’t provide the other chemicals that we need to assimilate those vitamins. Science is constantly identifying new substances in our food and assigning various benefits to them. For example, we have known about the essential vitamins and minerals for a long time. Sugary cereals have been fortified with them since before I was little. Things like “phytonutrients” and “bioflavonoids” on the other hand are fairly recent discoveries. That doesn’t mean that they haven’t been there all along, just that now science has identified them and associated various benefits to them. There are still plenty more chemicals in real food that science hasn’t yet identified, and who knows what benefits they have.
So, the gist of the first 8 pages of the book is that whole foods are much more effective than synthetic vitamins and that barley grass, whether as a fresh juice or a dried powder, is a very potent place to get a lot of the things that our bodies need to stay healthy.
My family takes Nikken’s Jade GreenZymes, an organic barley grass powder, just about every day. I love the stuff.
Wayne Woodworth