The Barleygreen Premium Story
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Known Benefits of Barleygreen
- Provides essential nutrients.
- Increases energy levels naturally.
- Improves digestion and promotes regularity.
- Naturally alkalizing.
- Strengthens the immune system.
- Improves hair, skin, and nails.
- Provides crucial nutritional support during
dieting and cleansing.
- Contains anti-inflammatory compounds.
- Provides a diversity of antioxidants.
- Supports a healthy cardiovascular system.
- Helps prevent lipid peroxidation.
- Promotes mental clarity.
- Helps to prolong our youthful vigor.
Phytochemicals
Green plants, especially green cereal grasses, are the perfect whole food. They are recognized as the basis of
the food chain because they are the ultimate source of nutrition for both animals and humans. Whether our
diet includes meat or is a strictly vegetarian one, green plants are our principal source of micronutrients (vitamins,
minerals, essential fatty acids, and essential amino acids) and they also provide a wealth of beneficial phytochemicals including
antioxidants, enzymes, and chlorophyll, which help to protect and repair the tissues of the body. In
addition, BarleyGreen and our other products that include organic barley grass, contain an array
of phytochemicals. These include three special types of phytochemicals that research has shown
are important to our health: carotenoids, flavonoids, and chlorophyll.
Caroteniods
These fat-soluble pigments give fruits and vegetables their yellow, orange and red colors. Green leafy vegetables
are rich in carotenoids but their pigments are masked by the green color of chlorophyll. Dietary
carotenoids provide a significant portion of the body’s vitamin A, particularly in a vegetarian diet. Many
carotenoids are antioxidants that protect cells against free radicals by neutralizing them before they cause oxidative
damage. Carotenoids including alpha-carotene, betacarotene,
and lutein are potent antioxidants that help protect the body from free radical damage. In addition to
being antioxidants, carotenoids also help to rejuvenate the body by promoting the growth of healthy cells and
inhibiting the growth of unhealthy ones. The beneficial actions of carotenoids are optimal when a variety of
carotenoids are consumed together, rather than alone.
Flavonoids
These compounds were first discovered by Nobel
Prize-winning biochemist Albert Szent-Gyorgi, who considered them essential to health because they seemed
necessary for protecting blood vessels and capillaries. He discovered that flavonoids greatly enhance the absorption
and effectiveness of vitamin C in preventing leaky capillaries and so he named them “vitamin P” (for “permeability
factor”).
Flavonoids are responsible for the bluish-purple colors of many fruits, vegetables, flowers, and outer skins of
nuts such as the peanuts. Flavonoids are known to possess possess potent antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, and
immune-enhancing properties. They have a beneficial action on numerous physiological processes in the body and have been
found to benefit the heart, blood vessels, liver, immune system, connective tissue, adrenal glands, kidneys,
musculature and nervous system. The flavonoid compound, 2”-O-GIV was first isolated by Osawa et. al. in 1992 from young barley grass juice and found to possess potent antioxidant activity. Over the last decade, 2”-O-GIV has been well-studied by Dr.
Takayuki Shibamoto and colleagues at the University of California, Davis. They have found that 2”-O-GIV, present only in young barley grass, is an extremely effective antioxidant in preventing free-radical oxidation of lipids
found in the skin and blood. Similar to other flavonoids, 2”-O-GIV enhances the antioxidant actions of vitamin
C. It also helps prevent the formation of the toxic compounds malonaldehyde and acetaldehyde, which are
known to denature proteins and DNA.
Chlorophyll
While green foods comprise a wide variety of different types, from single celled algae to flowering plants, they
all share one thing in common, chlorophyll. The benefits of various green foods seem related to their chlorophyll
content, perhaps as a result of specific beneficial substances, such as carotenoids and flavonoids that are often
found together with chlorophyll. Chlorophyll is known to help cleanse the body, fight infection, help heal wounds,
and promote the health of the circulatory, digestive,immune, and detoxification systems. Although chlorophyll is a volatile compound, the
chlorophyll in BarleyGreen is stabilized by the gentle extraction and spray-drying processes. While the mechanism
is unclear, chlorophyll consumption may increase the number of red blood cells and, therefore, increase
oxygen utilization by the body. Interestingly, the chlorophyll molecule is similar in structure to the heme molecule
of the oxygen-carrying protein, hemoglobin.
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