Introduction
Life comes from life. Always. Scientists have not taken any non-living substances and made them into a living organism. George Malkmus was very adamant in his presentations about this point. Life comes from life. And the corollary seems to be true. Living beings require living foods to thrive. And one of the most nutrient dense foods available to us is barley grass juice powder. The cereal grasses (oat, wheat, barley, rye grasses) are a food class by themselves, and contain factors not found abundantly in other foods. Let’s dive in and take a closer look at this.
Life Comes From Life
In the 1930s as scientists were isolating the various essential vitamins and minerals they went on a quest to see if they had found everything needed to support life. So they put together their best formulas and fed it to lab animals. When they fed chemically defined food to their guinea pigs, they languished, got sick, and died. There were still factors missing.
Fast forward to the 1990s and it was still true. While working with cell cultures in graduate school (biochemical engineering) we did not rely on chemically defined growth media either. Usually there were some yeast components, some hydrolyzed protein fraction, some lipid mixture, and for the best cell culture long-term stability, some bovine serum. We didn’t know all the factors that were necessary for sustaining life, even of single cells. Maybe you have been led to think that we know exactly what nutrients we need and how much of each one. There is an RDA for all the essential nutrients, right?
Wrong. Dead wrong. And I mean dead. If you fed young primates a chemically defined diet with all the known nutrients available in sufficient quantities, they would die. We have not identified all the factors necessary for sustaining life. If you get nothing else from this article, please get this point—we haven’t identified all the factors necessary for sustaining life.
Back in the 1930s as scientists tried to figure out what was needed for guinea pigs to survive (to see if they had uncovered all the essential nutrients), they came across what they termed the “grass juice factor.”
Grass Juice Factor: Older Research
Ronald Seibold describes the grass juice factor research in his book Cereal Grass: Nature’s Greatest Health Gift. Work on the grass juice factor began in the late 1920s. Dr. Schnabel was looking for a blood-building factor for his chickens. He serendipitously found that cereal grasses improved the health of chickens dramatically. Other green vegetables and alfalfa did not work. The chickens were disease-free and winter laying increased from 38% to 94%, with notably strong shells. Dr. George Kohler at the University of Wisconsin did a lot of research on the grass juice factor in the 1930s, getting excellent results with laboratory animals. The grass juice factor increased fertility in animals, inducing ovulation. Dairy cows increased milk production when fed the young grasses. The milk of cows fed the young grass sustained guinea pigs while winter milk did not. Infants of nursing women drinking this milk from grass-fed cows developed more rapidly than infants of women who drank milk from cows fed winter rations. (I think it would work even better for mom just to eat BarleyMax and breast-feed her infant.)
Even research in the 1960s did not uncover the exact nature of the grass juice factor. Liver extracts, whole milk, wheat germ, brewer’s yeast, vitamins K, A, D, E, C, B1, B2, B3 (niacin), B6, folic acid, B-12, inositol, iron, copper, manganese, and zinc were all tried as replacements for the grass juice factor over the years. The grass juice factor was essential for the good health of guinea pigs, yet it wasn’t one of these substances. None of these known nutrients could replace the factor from grasses, and to this day it is not known exactly what this factor is. The grass juice factor is not chlorophyll either, though this is a very beneficial nutrient. Some research indicates that it might be a flavonoid. Many green plants were screened for the grass juice factor, but the highest concentrations were found in the cereal grasses (barley, wheat, rye, oats), young white clover, peas, and cabbage. Other plant foods also contained some of this grass juice factor, but the highest concentrations are found in grass.
Research on Benefits of Green Grass Juice Continues
Modern research has continued to show that green grass juice has unexpected healing properties. Sixty women with breast cancer were given either 60 mls of fresh wheat grass daily or regular supportive care while undergoing chemotherapy. The wheat grass helped the women have fewer incidences (5 in the wheat grass group compared to 15 in the regular treatment group) of needing lower chemotherapy doses, prematurely terminated treatments, or needing GCSF or epoetin (to boost low white blood cell counts).
In another wheat grass juice study 23 patients with ulcerative colitis were randomly assigned to 100 mls of fresh wheat grass juice or a matching placebo for a month. In the wheat grass juice group the index of overall disease activity was significantly reduced as well as severity of rectal bleeding.
In a study of a myeloid leukemia cell line incubated with 6.5% or 13% ethanolic wheat grass juice extract (richer in phenolic and flavonoids than a water extract), the cancerous cells stopped growing and underwent programmed cell death (apoptosis, for abnormal and worn out cells), while normal myeloid cells were not affected. A recent test revealed that BarleyMax prevents DNA damage. A Comet assay of colon cancer cells found that a dilute solution of BarleyMax was able to protect the cells from DNA damage induced by hydrogen peroxide. And there is more current research that I will mention in further articles.
Which One is Best: Wheat Grass or Barley Grass?
Does it matter if it is oat, wheat, rye, or barley grass? Ron Seibold stated that nutritional analyses over the years indicate that the particular cereal grass used was less important for final nutritional content than the growing conditions in the field. Wheat or barley grass grown in the same field would have nearly the same nutritional profile. Each grass has a bit different flavor, but the nutrients would vary more from field to field than from type of grass. After screening the different cereal grasses available, Dr. Hagiwara chose barley grass as the best one for making a palatable, highly nutritious green grass juice powder food supplement.
Is Green Barley Grass Juice Powder Better than Salad?
BarleyMax does not replace salads, but it does have a few advantages over the salad greens. First, BarleyMax is made fresh. Instead of eating lettuce that came across the country from the Salinas Valley in California, BarleyMax is juiced and gently dehydrated within a few hours of cutting the grass. The grass is processed as quickly as possible to get a high-quality product. None of the fruits or vegetables in the produce section are this fresh.
Second, BarleyMax is enzymatically alive because of the fast, careful low-heat processing. There is very little loss of enzyme activity during the processing. This means the energy from the fresh young grass is captured in a powdered state and ready for you to eat and absorb at your convenience. With no additives and no preservatives, BarleyMax is fresher and more nutritious than you possibly could do yourself. Two grams of BarleyMax is equivalent to the juice from 50 grams of fresh barley and alfalfa leaves, all cut, juiced, carefully dried, and ready to be easily absorbed.
Third, all the nutrients in BarleyMax are available to you. In your salad, only what you chew well is available to you. Your body will do very little after your mouth to break open plant cells that don’t get broken open by chewing. That’s why blended salads work so well. Even after chewing well some of the nutrients in your salad are stuck in the cellular membranes of the plants and don’t get extracted very well during digestion. So, you won’t really get all the nutrition out of your salad.
BarleyMax is just the juice of the plant without the fiber. It is important that you purchase barley grass juice powder rather than barley grass powder, which is just expensive hay. The nutrients in the juice powder are not locked up inside the cells like they are in the case of the grass powder. All the nutrients in the juice powder are ready to be absorbed. No worry about not chewing well or fiber binding up nutrients. You get all the nutrients from BarleyMax that your body is able to absorb. This difference between salad and BarleyMax may not mean too much for a healthy young man or woman, but if you have any kind of digestive issue, or if you are older then you need all the help you can get to improve digestion and absorption of nutrients.
Summary
So, that is why you should eat green barley grass juice power. It is a living food that will help sustain a living body—yours. It has growth factors in high amounts that will sustain excellent health. It has been shown to promote life and healing in scientific studies since the 1960s with ongoing research still today. And the juice powder is the right form for you to get the most nutrition from barley grass or wheat grass. Cereal grasses like wheat grass and barley grass are a food group in and of themselves. And BarleyMax is at the top of the class, so give it a try.
