Barley

Nobody made as good a German ham loaf is she did

Is ending sentences without punctuation correct? In informal forums like this one, we often choose which grammar rules we’re willing to follow and which we’re not.

The content is more important than minor grammar rules.

@MarieB, @Lorraine, @Stemwinder_Gary - Could one of you please prune this off-topic excursion from @katzgar’s first comment through where appropriate when you get to this and use it to start a need thread? I think we need a grammar police thread and the barley thread is getting hi-jacked! Thank-you.

Edited to add: I decided to just go ahead and start the grammar thread.

While I enjoy conversations about language and grammar,

plus, we try to stay “on topic” here in the forum.

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I couldn’t agree more. Frankly if grammar is a big deal on this forum it’s doing a big disservice 2 diabetics

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So, would anyone like to talk about barley?

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I haven’t really eaten much barley so I’m not sure how it might affect your blood sugar levels. If you’re looking for a grain, this seems like one of the better ones because a decent portion of the carbs appear to be fiber.

Here’s a link to a list of recipes that look like they use dehulled barley: Start With Barley to Make Quick Recipes

Maybe checkout the photos at the bottom. Some of the recipes look pretty good. When I googled hulled barley, I came up with a bunch of claims about how it was a miracle food. It looks like it’s supposed to be good for your heart and blood pressure. If these are concerns for you, then maybe it’s worth trying out and seeing if it changes your bloodwork next time.

[Edit]: It looks like many of these recipes call for pearled barley. I wonder if you could just cook the dehulled barley for longer and substitute it into the recipe?

There are many claims online about different foods either “regulating blood glucose” or “improving the regulation of blood glucose.” Wikipedia is moderated by community users (i.e., anyone, just about), and shouldn’t, in my opinion, be trusted for medically relevant information. I’ve learned to be skeptical about any claims on Wikipedia or anywhere else about foods that help in “regulating blood glucose” or similar claims.

As for barley itself, I can’t suggest where to find it in any form, other than that coops are good places to find bulk ingredients in various forms. What I do know is that barley doesn’t affect my blood glucose any differently than any other grain with a similar fiber to digestible carbohydrate to protein profile. As far as my blood sugar is concerned, glycemic index values, different sources of fiber or digestible carbohydrate, etc. doesn’t seem to matter as much total content of carbs, fiber, protein, and fats. Fiber and fats tend to slow down blood sugar spikes for me; protein can be hit or miss depending on many other factors; digestible carbohydrate is directly correlated to my blood glucose, although when spikes occur is affected by what else comes with them.

So, for me, I generally choose not to eat barley, oats, wheats, and other high-carb grains, because they all tend to affect my BG in similar ways and I don’t have great tools to deal with the blood glucose increases. I have experimented (especially early on) to see whether barley or oats were better for me than an equal-caloric quantity of wheat or corn, etc. Personally, I didn’t find any significant difference in affects on my blood glucose.

I’ve started another thread about grammar. I wish I had started it earlier!

I’d be happy to discuss barley.

We have removed several off topic posts in this discussion that resulted in a disagreement among participants. We make no judgement of blame for the disagreement for it appears to have been based on a misunderstanding.

Shall we resume the discussion of Barley

The Wikipedia article has this statement:

According to Health Canada and the US Food and Drug Administration, consuming at least 3 grams per day of barley beta-glucan or 0.75 grams per serving of soluble fiber can lower levels of blood cholesterol, a risk factor for cardiovascular diseases.[51][52]

Eating whole-grain barley, as well as other grains with lots of fiber, improves regulation of blood sugar (i.e., reduces blood glucose response to a meal).[53] Consuming breakfast cereals containing barley over weeks to months also improved cholesterol levels and glucose regulation.[54]

Note the references which all point to peer-reviewed academic research papers linked at the bottom of the Wikipedia article. Unfortunately, the links to academic papers on Wikipedia generally point only to the abstract of the papers and access to the full content of the articles is behind a paywall, but that’s as good as we civilians can get for free. Nonetheless, it’s still what I consider a positive indicator that barley may be beneficial to PWDs. So, yes, Wikipedia is moderated by community users but the Wikipedia standards require articles to be backed by valid references. It’s not like some of those spam emails I get with a click-bait subject line that says something like “Everyday kitchen spice can cure diabetes!!” and leads to an article about cinnamon written by a car sales person.

Thank you

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I followed a few of the wikipedia links (and followed a reference from one of those to another study). Looks like there are quite few studies which state that β-glucan from barley can have positive effects on LDL cholesterol levels. I didn’t see much evidence for barley helping to control diabetes, but I may have missed those links. Are you hoping to control cholesterol or blood sugar levels? Or both?

The Canadian reference from Wikipedia stated the following:

"The direction of effect (without taking statistical significance into account) was highly consistent towards a reduction for total cholesterol (100%) and LDL-cholesterol (94%) when barley beta-glucan was consumed. In addition, a high proportion (78%) of trial arms showed a statistically significant reduction in total and LDL-cholesterol levels when barley beta-glucan was consumed. These conclusions were similar when only the higher-quality studies were taken into account.

Inconsistencies and conflicting results were reported in some clinical trials using extracted beta-glucans. Differences in consistency of the direction of effect between trials using barley grain products and trials using barley beta-glucan extracts were minimal. However, when statistical significance was taken into account, a high proportion (91%) of trial arms using barley grain products showed significantly lower total and LDL-cholesterol levels, while only 57% of trial arms using barley beta-glucan extracts reported significantly lower total and LDL-cholesterol levels."

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Nope, not worrying about cholesterol. The articles indeed don’t say much about helping to control blood sugar. I’m not a skilled academic researcher but the statement “Eating whole-grain barley, as well as other grains with lots of fiber, improves regulation of blood sugar (i.e., reduces blood glucose response to a meal).” as quoted in reference 53 is a starting point. So far I have not seen anything to validate that particular statement but it piques my interest enough that I’ll probably buy some de-hulled barley and experiment with it to see if it seems to make a difference.

Thus, the whole reason for my original question was to see if our cohort either had any experiences that might give an indication as to its validity or pointers to research that actually addresses that statement. Thanks much for your comment.

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If you try the de-hulled barley, I hope you would update us here whether it helped or not. Do you use a CGM? CGM data would really help to portray your results. Fingerstick data can work, too, but would require some discipline getting readings at mealtime and then one and/or two hours later.

Research science doesn’t place much value in one person’s experience (anecdote) but I’ve found that being an anecdote does not necessarily mean it’s false. It just hasn’t been proven with the statistical heft and rigor of a research study.

Good luck! I would be interested in what you discover.

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If I get around to trying de-hulled barley, I’ll report back here. I do not use a CGM though. I’m hoping maybe there may be some actual controlled studies that might clarify what may have been a speculative statement in the paper I referred to.

Unfortunately, our research funding in the US is skewed toward the financial interests of Pharma. When a common food grain, like barley, is the potential beneficiary, the big money sponsors are not often interested.

It’s one of the reasons that rigorous studies of low carb diets are few and far between. They are expensive to do well as it usually means sequestering people for a reasonable time duration and controlling all their food intake.

It’s says the same thing on Metamucil. My understanding is that the accuracy of saying that “high fiber foods help improve blood sugar regulation” has come under increased scrutiny lately. To my knowledge there is no legitimate mechanism in which they could possibly improve “regulation”. That said, foods higher in fiber do offset other digestible carbohydrates and therefore generally are less disruptive to blood sugar than foods with a larger portion of their carbohydrate content digestible… also foods with higher fiber content tend to be more complex types of carbohydrates, which digest slower (beans, barley, lentils, etc) than more simple carbs such as ground wheat, sugars etc…with slower digestion we experience less disruption in many cases, but again I don’t think there is any magic or “improved regulation” being triggered within ones body

Barley doesn’t cause me to have a huge spike but rather an extended rise over the course of 4 hours give or take so I avoid it.