Here's something that continues to baffle me. Modern health advice pushes whole grains over refined ones for their fiber content, and there's good clinical evidence that the increased fiber in whole grains is good for cardiovascular health. And so it's pretty easy to get, e.g., brown rice at...
...restaurants and grocery stores. But, as whole grains go, brown rice is pretty weak in terms of fiber content: you're getting like 2g of fiber per serving, and it's entirely (or almost entirely) insoluble. It's still a good improvement over white rice, health-wise, and there may be other...
...advantages to the fibrous parts of rice. BUT here's the thing: culinary, everywhere you use rice, you can substitute barley with good effect; and, in many cases, end up with something that's subjectively more pleasant (texture, flavor) than brown rice. And the health benefits of barley...
...are WAY GREATER than the health benefits of brown rice. The macronutrient profile is basically the same, except that barley has approximately THREE TIMES AS MUCH FIBER as brown rice. And more importantly, a large part of this is a soluble fiber known as beta glucan, which has clinically...
...significant impacts on blood lipids, lowering "bad" cholesterol and boosting "good" cholesterol. And yet you *can't* find it in restaurants, and it's difficult to find in grocery stores. And when you do find it, it's in tiny packages (like 16 oz, where I can get 50 lb bags of rice if I want).
I don't know what we can do to encourage the use of barley instead of brown rice -- where increased supply would presumably result in more production and availability -- but I encourage you to make the change where you can. Something so simple could have non-trivial public health benefits.
