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Comment by fellowniusmonk | Hacker News Reader

I just use my microwave to boil and drink a couple tablespoons of ground barley with a sweetener, beta glucan is amazing and hulled barley is awesome, cheap and higher in beta glucan than oats.

Solved every gastro issue I've ever had, humans co-evolved with barley and it's awesome. No modifications needed.

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Not a bad idea for your health, but it won't trap plasticizers. We're modifying the beta glucan to have many tiny, "sticky" pores to trap the chemicals in the gut, so they go out with the rest of the beta glucan. Pure beta glucan, whether from oats or barley, won't have much effect.

Based on everything I know about the mechanism of action and the impact of dietary fiber in general on microplastic adsorption I would need to see a study with protocols and raw data published to be convinced that barley is lacking and your solution is superior but I'm open to it.

https://iadns.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/fft2....

Unfortunately, unless I've misread, the evidence for barley in this case is zero. So any evidence for the modified solution wins.

Hulled Barley is a combination of both IDF and SDF's, that study is for DF across the board. Frankly a barley drink made with unfiltered french press coffee would probably be the single best/easiest validated drink for reducing absorption of microplastics and heavy metals.

But it is an under researched area for sure.

edit because I can't reply: the above paper I linked references coffee grounds and MP.

Can you expand on the coffee portion? Why would that be beneficial?

Wouldn't that trap a lot more than just the plasticizers?

So you eat both, have ground barley with something to make it more palatable and cook with hulled barley in meals? Seems like it's a better solution than psyllium fiber.

I grind hulled barley to a powder and then boil it with RO water in the microwave. Total cook time in my microwave for the ~2tbl I consume is 2 minutes and 10 seconds.

I put in a little stevia/monk fruit for taste.

Because the end result is basically a thickened drink with a rather neutral flavor I'll often throw in my 3rd shot of espresso for the day or just drink it as is while still hot.

A lot of cultures that are long lived tend to have barley based drinks but of course isolating barley's effect is a fools errand, it's just correlation at best.

I started playing with barley for a "cream of wheat" esq experience, which was actually way better than cream of wheat or oats but I found that the water absorption of barley is so high that for gastro purposes it's more consistent to add enough water that it remains a drink.

The upside bonus is that due to the mechanism of action you can start with very low volumes of barley and it doesn't give you gastro distress the way other types of fiber supplementation can, basically the soluble fiber slows down the movement of food through the intestines giving your gut more digestive time to create a homogenous, gelled slurry making the defection process closer to ideal texture.

I now also spend far less time on the toilet and it only takes 2 minutes and a single hot beverage every morning.

One other positive side effect is I've found that my overall hydration stays more consistent as well.

Thanks for the info! I'm always using psyllium but reading more and hearing about barley it seems like combining the two for my morning and evening drink might be the way to go.

Sounds good! I used to worry about insoluble fiber more but barley's been very effective for me so I dropped psyllium, it's method of action is improves fermentation so it definitely takes a few weeks to normalize everything. I found that with supplementing with insoluble fiber (psyllium) food was moving through my digestion too fast.

interesting, how often do you drink it?

We're still prototyping and testing, but you'll probably have to eat it twice a day to get complete coverage. It needs to be in the gut at the same time as the plasticizer to have any effect.

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