If you don’t know you will buy a cheaper, inferior product. Then you will think all barley grass products are bad, taste awful and don’t deliver results. But here at Hallelujah Diet we know that our premium, raw, organic barley grass juice powder, BarleyMax, does deliver fantastic results based on the testimonies of thousands of satisfied customers who keep buying BarleyMax year after year.
Which One Tastes Like the Fresh Produce?
Grape juice vs raisins?
Plum juice vs dried prunes?
Apple juice vs dried apples?
Carrot juice powder vs dried whole carrot pulp?
We all know these products (well, maybe not the carrot one so much…yet), and we easily recognize the differences between them. But we aren’t as familiar with barley grass products. What difference does it really make?
Barley Grass Juice Powder vs Barley Grass Powder
The difference is in how these two products are made. Leaf powder is just expensive hay. Juice powder tastes like fresh squeezed juice from the plant. No fiber, just juice.
Many people, when they taste carrot juice for the first time have a bit of an epiphany. They had no idea that carrot juice could be sweet and delicious. Their only experience with carrots was chewing up the whole carrot as carrot sticks or in a salad or something like that. The juice is a whole new delightful experience.
This analogy is even more true for barley grass juice and barley grass powder. The taste and nutrition of the barley grass juice powder is exceptional, and the barley grass powder tastes bad, like hay mixed into water. Because that is what it is.
To make barley grass powder the grass is dried and then micronized into small particles that flow into a jar and that will kind of mix into water.
To make barley grass juice powder the grass is cut and then juiced, removing the fiber. The chilled juice is then carefully dried with as little heat as necessary and a blanket of inert CO2 to prevent oxidation of sensitive nutrients (in the case of BarleyMax at least) into a powder without carriers or additives. The final product is just the dehydrated juice powder from organic barley grass. It mixes into water by shaking, doesn’t separate into layers of fiber and brown water, and smells and tastes just like the juice did before it was dried.
The Proof is Revealed in Enzyme Testing
At Hallelujah Diet we have pioneered the method for determining how much heat has been applied to a food product that is claimed to be raw. Over the years at the Raw Food Lab we have done extensive testing on many types of products to see if “raw” products are actually enzymatically active and truly raw.
Heat destroys enzymes and destroys the vitality of raw, living foods. As living beings we thrive when a large portion of our diet comes from raw, living foods. Life begets life. Living beings thrive on living foods. That is just the way we were designed.
Raw Food Lab Testing Results: Juice Powders Rule
Years ago we bought all of the well-known barley grass juice products and barley grass powder products and submitted them to our panel of enzyme tests. The results are compiled here in order of rank. The products with the highest enzyme activity are at the top of the list and the ones with very low enzyme activity are at the bottom of the list.
The products can be broken into 4 tiers of enzyme activity. The juice powders are at the top of the list and the whole leaf powders are at the bottom of the list. Most of the whole leaf powders had almost no enzyme activity, barely being detectable by our sensitive assay method.
Enzyme Testing Shows Whole Leaf Powders are Heated
First, the enzyme tests reveal that whole leaf barley powder products are exposed to more heat than the juice powder products. It requires more heat or time to dry intact plant cells than it does to dry a juice already extracted from plant cells. When enzymes are exposed to elevated heat for too long, the enzymes are deactivated in these products. The longer heat exposure also means that other sensitive nutrients like volatile essential oils are also lost.
Nutrients Remain Locked Up in the Fiber of Whole Leaf Barley Grass Powder
The second problem with whole leaf barley grass powder is that most of the plant cells remain intact in the product. Normally, we chew whole plant foods to break open the cells. But no one chews grass powder stirred into a glass of water. It is already in small pieces, too small to chew. But they are not all broken open at the cellular level.
As a result, the nutrition in those cells, although it shows up in a nutritional analysis, won’t do you any good. The plant cells that go down our throats intact will not get digested because we do not have the enzymes to break down cellulose, hemicellulose and pectin in our system. Only the nutrients that are extracted from the plant cells are available to enhance health. Many of the nutrients remain locked inside the cell structure of the dehydrated leaves. These whole leaf products are just expensive fiber. Hay will sustain cows through the winter, or on a feedlot, but we don’t have the digestive tract of a cow to extract nutrition from intact grass. We need the juice from the grass to derive benefit from it.
Summary
Now, do you want barley hay or barley grass juice? Our testing shows whole leaf barley grass powder has very, very little enzyme activity. The nutrients remain locked up inside the cells of the dried grass. We do need fiber, but we don’t need hay, even if it is in a fancy bottle. For over 20 years BarleyMax has been the premium, raw organic barley grass juice of choice for health conscious people.