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Why You Should Eat Barley For Breakfast Every Morning

I’ve got one word for you…

Barley. I know, right? Who knew? But it’s a super-duper super grain.

Five amazing things that barley can do:

1. Rapidly improve health by reducing blood sugar levels
2. Actually reduce risk of diabetes
3. Suppress appetite
4. Reduce risk of cardiovascular disease
5. Reduce chronic inflammation

Nutrition geeks from the Food for Health Science Centre in Sweden say that it’s “surprising” that barley can generate such remarkable health benefits in such a short period of time.

“After eating the bread made out of barley kernel, we saw an increase in gut hormones that regulate metabolism and…

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Featured

  How to Cook Barley for Breakfast

What has twice the protein and almost half the calories as oats? Barley, and it’s about time we started eating it for breakfast.

 Barley: Skip the Pearl and Choose Hulled or Hulless for Whole Grain Goodness

While there are many food production benefits to milling, including increased shelf life, the disadvantages are the removal of important and essential nutrients including fiber, iron, and several B vitamins. A few examples of refined grains are pearl barley and quick pearl barley, de-germed cornmeal, white bread, white flour, and white rice. Even though most refined grains are enriched, which is the process of replacing lost nutrients during processing such as B vitamins and iron, the fiber is not replaced.

 Your barley may get naked soon—which means it’ll be better for you

Researchers are trying to grow barley that doesn't have to be stripped of its nutrients. What the researchers are trying to promote is a version of barley where the hull naturally separates from the seed, leaving all the fiber and nutrients behind. “You can use the whole grain. And then you benefit from all those nutritional qualities that are in the outer part of the kernel, just like whole wheat bread,” says Sorrells.

Articles of Interest

Barley World

Barley is one of the oldest known domesticated crops and remains the fourth most widely grown cereal crop in the world today. Barley has three principal end uses: feed, food, and malt. Despite being domesticated for human consumption originally, today barley is mainly produced for animal feed or malted for use in brewing and distilling.

Discovering Barley's Hidden Charms

As someone who dines out a lot for work, I can tell you that barley doesn't appear on a whole lot of menus. And as a home cook, I can see how this grain maybe isn't perceived to be as sexy as farro, as healthy as quinoa or as versatile as oats. But barley has a lot more going for it than being malted for beer or being dumped in a soup.

Dr. Perricone's No. 3 Superfood: Barley

This ancient grain is sadly overlooked by today's culinary trendsetters, yet it is one of the grains with the greatest health benefits, delightful flavor and versatility. Barley can be used as a delicious breakfast cereal, in soups and stews and as a rice substitute for dishes such as risotto.

New Praise for an Old Grain

Contrary to culinary lore, barley does not have to take a long time to cook. Soaking it for four hours, or overnight, reduces the cooking time to 20 minutes from 40 minutes. The new health claims for barley, like those for oats, are substantial and are based on ''significant scientific evidence,'' according to the Food and Drug Administration. These differ from recent qualified health claims the Food and Drug Administration allowed for walnuts, which are based on ''supportive but not conclusive research.''

Association of Lifelong Intake of Barley Diet with Healthy Aging:

Barley intake reportedly reduces the risk of cardiovascular disease, but effects on the systemic phenotypes during healthy aging have not yet been examined.

Barley more than soup

It’s nothing new to consume barley. People have been doing so for over 4,000 years. It was Europe’s most important crop until the 16th century, and its importance is illustrated by the fact that in Tudor England, the inch was standardized as 3 barleycorns long, the foot 39 barleycorns long and the yard, 117 barleycorns. In more modern times, barley has become an important crop in Canada, where it is the fourth largest crop (over 8 million tonnes per year), after wheat, corn and canola.

Barley Packs Some Major Bod Benefits

This simple grain has serious superfood potential, according to a new study.

Barley – The Original Superfood

Barley is the oldest grain that people been known to cultivate – it has been known by Pre-Christian cultures as ‘The Holy Grain’. It was a staple in the diet of the ancient gladiators in Rome and its Legionnaires , and is referenced in the bible that ‘It was with five barley loaves and two fishes that our Lord fed the five thousand’ (John 6: 9-10).

Barley, Beta Glucans, and You – The Health Benefits of Barley

Let’s talk about barley. This little grain is often overlooked and forgotten. Wheat, oats, and brown rice are the ones we think of when someone starts talking about grains. Poor barley gets relegated to the occasional soup recipe. To be fair, barley does shine in soups and veggie stews, but it deserves a little more attention than we tend to give it.

Barley: Know Why You Should Include This Whole Grain In Daily Diet

Barley is a type of whole grain cereal that has a chewy texture and nutty flavour, commonly known as Jau in India. It is available in different forms such as hulled barley, barley grits, flakes etc., and one of the oldest cultivated grains in our country.

Grain of the month: Barley

You can buy barley in two forms: hulled and pearled. Hulled barley is minimally processed to remove only the tough outer coating (hull). Pearled barley technically doesn't count as a whole grain, because both the hull and the seed kernel's outer coating (bran) are removed during processing. However, the beta glucans are found in the main part of the kernel (endosperm), so pearled barley is still a healthy choice.

Healthy showdown: Barley vs brown rice

If you’re on a gluten-free diet, brown rice is the clear winner, because barley contains gluten. Brown rice also has over five times more folate and vitamin E. However, barley has twice the calcium and fibre and about 30 per cent fewer calories. The two are equivalent in protein and fat content. Ultimately, both grains are healthy choices and getting variety from both is best. Winner: it’s a tie.

Oldest evidence of malted barley shows ancient Scandinavians made beer

Ancient malted barley grains have revealed that Danes were probably using this to brew beer and raising their drinking horns at least two millennia ago. The oldest known beers in the world trace back to the beginning of agriculture in the Middle East. In Scandinavia, the oldest evidence of this drink is based on residue in a bark bucket from roughly 1370 BC.

Super foods, the ultimate health foods – Barley

Pearl barley is the most common form of barley you'll see at supermarkets and health food shops. It's the polished grain after removal or pearling of most of the outer bran, a milling process similar to milling brown rice into white rice. Yet due to its different composition, pearl barley retains quite a lot of its original fibre and nutrients so can be considered a 'whole grain' much like brown rice.

The health and culinary benefits of eating barley

Barley fell from favor for a while—it was considered “peasant food”—but today we appreciate it for its beta-glucan, a type of soluble fiber. One of the biggest benefits of eating barley is that when beta-glucan mixes with liquids in our digestive tract, it develops a gelatin-like consistency that can remove excess cholesterol (including “bad” LDL cholesterol) from our bodies.

Resources

5 Amazing Barley Water Benefits: Drink Up This Elixir to Good Health

While we now marvel at one of the variants - pearl barley, with the ongoing trend of eating what our ancestors ate and using it to toss up salads and quick stir-fries, another barley form which is garnering attention is barley water. The benefits of barley water aplenty.

7 Impressive Health Benefits of Barley That Might Surprise You

If you're looking for lots of extra fiber, you're going to want to opt for this grain versus brown rice.

GoBarley

GoBarley.com is Canada's go-to source for barley nutritional information, recipes, blogs and more. It's local, it's a superfood & it's versatile! #gobarley

The Healthy Grain

BARLEYmax® represents the next evolution of superfoods, an enhanced wholegrain. Discovered and tested by CSIRO.

The World's Healthiest Foods

Barley is a wonderfully versatile cereal grain with a rich nutlike flavor and an appealing chewy, pasta-like consistency. Its appearance resembles wheat berries, although it is slightly lighter in color. Sprouted barley is naturally high in maltose, a sugar that serves as the basis for both malt syrup sweetener. When fermented, barley is used as an ingredient in beer and other alcoholic beverages.

Whole Grains Council

Health benefits of barley.