Nutritious green leaves of barley

Green Leaves of Barley, by Dr. Mary Ruth Swope, begins by warning "there 's a war going on" between orthodox medicine and the advocates of nutrition as a means of health care.

The foreword and first chapter -- written by David A. Darbro, M.D. -- make a good case for the advantages of preventing and reversing degenerative disease by building a healthy immune system... rather than resorting to the orthodox medical route of pharmaceutical drugs, radiation, chemotherapy, and surgery.

After making a case for nutrition, Drs. Swope and Darbro agree the best way of improving one's nutritional intake is with the dried powder of green leaves of barley. Swope's purpose in writing this book is " to encourage Americans, and people everywhere, to improve their declining health through improving their diet." The author and nutrition educator writes that she feels " the best, easiest, quickest, least-expensive single way of improving the nutrient density of your diet is by the daily addition of a serving of green leaves of barley."

Dr. Swope details an extremely wide range of advantages to adding this nutritional supplement to one's diet. She explains the medical and scientific reasons why green leaves of barley benefit the body, and her book includes the written testimonies of over 100 people who say this supplement has helped their arthritis, cancer, high blood pressure, hay fever, digestion, cardiovascular problems and more.

A careful reading of this book allows one to not only learn much about the humble barley plant, but also our own bodies, beginning with the cellular level. Swope writes: " If it could be expected that all scientists in the world agreed on a single fact, I believe they would agree... 'Life begins, is maintained and ends at the cellular level.' The health of a single cell holds the key to the health of the whole organism." Darbro adds, " Cells made strong through good nutrition will go a long way in giving you an immune system that will resist the illnesses so prevalent in our society."

In addition to scientific knowledge, the book also has its share of common sense about nutrition. For example: " What humans (or animals for that matter) regularly consume in terms of their food and drink can be used as a remarkably accurate predictor of their length and quality of life, their reproductibility, their size, vitality, disease patterns, mental problems, productivity and so forth." And: " All living, rejuvenating, healing processes are intimately related to the work of nutrients." These appear to be simple, harmless truths, but by the time you are halfway through Chapter 1, you will see how these two common sense statements lead to medical heresy .

Darbro begins the book by giving the reader a history of the controversy between the American Medical Association and alternative health care. He notes there is irony in the fact that the word " physician" is derived from the ancient Greek word " physis," which was used to describe the body's tendency to heal itself. The word was coined in the Fourth Century B.C. by Hippocrates, The Father of Medicine, who described the phenomena of physis by saying, " It is nature that finds the way... though untaught and uninstructed, it does what is proper... to preserve a perfect equilibrium... to reestablish order and harmony."

Doctors graduating from medical school still take the Hippocratic Oath today. But over 2,000 years after the time of Hippocrates, the medical profession split over the issue of whether disease should be fought by strengthening the physis, or to offer a bolder form of intervention that fights the specific disease being treated.

It was the latter school of thought -- allopathy -- that won the battle. Darbro refers to this war as a " fight to the death" in which " no prisoners are taken... no mercy is shown." For example, he quotes a pamphlet stating that when the A.M.A. formed in 1849, it began a tradition of " economic self-interest and the squelching of all intellectual opposition" by barring homeopathic doctors from its ranks and prohibiting its membership from using any homeopathic techniques. And under the heading of " Big Business Gets Bigger," Darbro details how pharmaceutical companies became involved, buying some influential medical journals, and advertising in others. With the flow of information to physicians owned or supported by the drug industry, Darbro quotes Dr. Atkins' Health Revolution as saying doctors that "had once been open to any therapeutic system... (now) assumed the only answer was pharmaceutical." Another way, cited from Atkins' book, that medical choice is under corporate control is that funding for grants for new research go more often to study pharmaceuticals and chemotherapy than nutrition.

Dr. Darbro spent 15 years of his medical career as "card-carrying AMA type," dispensing drugs designed to "maintain disease at an acceptable level" before realizing he needed "to do much less of fighting disease and do much more of promoting wellness."

Drs. Swope and Darbro agree that in the time of a medical emergency, a hospital is the best place to be. But they note that 70 percent of all deaths in the U.S. are caused by diseases linked to diet, and modern medicine has not been successful in curing these degenerative conditions, such as cancer and heart disease. Swope writes: "The tragedy of degenerative disease is that the conditions which are so often fatal by the time they require attention from a doctor are the very same conditions that are almost entirely preventable through a personal commitment to good nutrition." To this end, Drs. Swope and Darbro recommend improved eating habits and the addition of dried powder from the juice of green barley leaves. Swope recommends the specific product formulated by Dr. Yoshihide Hagiwara, a Japanese medical doctor and research pharmacologist. But with the exception of comparative nutrition tables, the book avoids mention of the product name "BarleyGreen."

Much of the book is dedicated to the scientific and medical reasons as to why this powdered juice from barley leaves is beneficial to the body. The young barley plant is described by Dr. Hagiwara as containing "the most prolific balanced supply of nutrients that exist on earth in a single source." Entire chapters are used to explain why its alkalinity makes this product the ideal antacid (and the importance of pH in cell functioning); why the body needs the live enzymes contained in green barley; the benefits of chlorophyll found in green barley; the advantages of receiving vitamins in a natural, chelated form; and the other ways in which this supplement helps bolster the immune system.

Green Leaves of Barley : Nature's.. can be found through this link at Amazon.

Green Barley Essence (Good Health Series) can be found through this link at Amazon