Nutrition Tempest in a Juice Glass : Health: Barley Green is a controversial nutritional supplement about to be produced in Oxnard. The developer claims benefits that some experts dispute.

Before a spellbound crowd in a hotel convention hall here, speaker after speaker hailed the wonders of Barley Green.

The mother of an eight-month-old baby told how her little Kyle has been spared the discomfort of teething as well as a host of other infant woes. “He’s the healthiest baby people have ever seen,” said Heidi Geraghty, 25.

A 62-year-old woman who said she had become so drained and listless that her husband had threatened “to shop for a new lady” reported unbounding energy. “My skin is softer, too,” said Marilyn Whitaker.

Her husband, a 59-year-old microscope repairman named Clyde, said that four minutes had been knocked off his two-mile jogging routine and that his shoulders had been rid of nagging stiffness.

In one testimonial after another, distributors of the emerald-green powder that is sold as a nutritional supplement claimed to have sailed past life’s obstacles large and small.

They credited Barley Green, an instant juice mix made of dried barley leaves, which has been imported from Japan for nine years by Green Foods Corp. of Torrance, but within three months will be manufactured in Oxnard--thanks in part to a $9.8-million industrial bond from the city.

Its developer, a Japanese pharmacologist and researcher named Yoshihide Hagiwara, claims that he tapped “the most prolific, balanced supply of nutrients that exists on earth in a single source” when he began pulverizing, spray-drying and packaging barley leaves in powder form 19 years ago.

Since that time, the part of the plant that used to be discarded or fed to livestock “has proven effective” in conditions as diverse as leukemia and acne, Hagiwara wrote in a 1985 book titled “Green Barley Essence: the Ideal Fast Food.”

But not everybody sees a panacea in the product that looks like a green version of orange-flavored Tang and tastes like a brew of spinach and newly mown grass.

“The juice of any plant is nutritious but to say that the juice of barley greens are especially nutritious is pure garbage,” said Wayne R. Bidlack, an associate professor of pharmacology and nutrition at USC.

What’s more, there is no scientific proof that either the drink, which is also sold in health-food stores under the brand name “Green Magma,” or barley leaves themselves have any medicinal properties, Bidlack contended. He cited Barley Green as an example of “nutritional quackery” in an article that appeared earlier this year in “California Pharmacist,” a professional journal.

Hagiwara counters that U.S. researchers should study the plant more extensively.

“I’m the only one who has studied the value of barley greens,” he said in a recent interview. “No one else has done the research.”

Still, the state consumer protection divisions in North Carolina and Wyoming say the product has no demonstrated medicinal value and have ordered distributors there to stop claiming otherwise in company literature and videotapes.

And the attorney general’s office of a third state, Iowa, is conducting an investigation into the possibility Barley Green’s distributor, American Image Marketing, or AIM, of Nampa, Ida., may have violated the state’s Consumer Fraud Act with its nutritional and medicinal claims there, said Iowa Assistant Atty. Gen. Ray Johnson.

Warning Letter

The Food and Drug Administration jumped into the fray last year with a letter warning AIM that it was violating the Food, Drug and Cosmetics Act with “grossly misleading” advertising of Barley Green and four other products.

When AIM officials allegedly failed to curb such claims, the FDA in July confiscated more than $500,000 worth of health-food supplements sold by AIM, including Barley Green, said Donald E. Peterson, the compliance officer who handled the case.

AIM officials have since agreed to destroy promotional literature overstating the health value of Barley Green and the four other products, as well as refrain from printing any such literature in the future and stop supplying distributors who do so on their own, Peterson said.

While acknowledging that FDA officials are still powerless to police oral claims made by distributors because only written or videotaped ones hold up in court, Peterson believes that his office has brought an end to AIM’s alleged abuses.

“When they have to promote the product in a legitimate way,” he said, “you’re not going to have much interest.”

Others are not so optimistic.

Multilevel Marketing

Critics warn that exaggerated claims frequently accompany multilevel marketing approaches. The approach, used by AIM in the marketing of Barley Green, encourages distributors to recruit other salespeople. That way, the distributors profit not only from the goods they sell, but also from those sold by the individuals they recruit, and from goods sold by many salespeople recruited thereafter.

“The whole concept of multilevel marketing is high-powered sales,” said Hugh Kenny, an assistant attorney general in Wyoming who fielded complaints about Barley Green. William Jarvis, a professor of preventive medicine at Loma Linda University and president of a consumers group called the National Council Against Health Fraud, is less diplomatic: “These things are sold on a pyramid scheme.”

AIM officials bristle at the suggestion and point out that they take such steps to protect their distributors as offering a full refund for unsold products and recommending that they stock no more than 20% of the inventory that they move in a typical month.

They also said Barley Green distributors sign an agreement stipulating that the product not be sold as “a cure, prescription or therapeutic aid.”

They hint that the FDA’s seizure was motivated by a drug company that wants to sell a product similar to an AIM health-food supplement made from tobacco leaves.

Wanted to Help

And most of the 200 or so distributors who recently gathered at a Sacramento hotel to pay homage to Hagiwara claimed that profit was the farthest thing from their minds. They merely wanted to help others, they said. They don’t see themselves as selling Barley Green, they said. They “share” it.

They listened to a motivational speech by one of Barley Green’s top sellers, who told them that it was their fault, not that of the company, if they failed to move the beverage that Hagiwara pitches as a substitute for green leafy vegetables.

“So many people say, ‘My business has stagnated,’ ” said Ron Murray, a 34-year-old Canadian plumber. “I say, ‘Go buy $100 worth of brochures--minimum.’ ”

Mostly housewives and retired people who began selling Barley Green as a means to get a discount on it, they listened intently as company officials explained how it was “unethical” to charge less than the list price of $34 for a 100-serving jar of “salad in a glass.”

“It’s unfair to other distributors,” said Ron Price, a 36-year-old former evangelist who left his East Lansing, Mich., flock three years ago to become AIM’s vice president for distributor services. “They may need the money.”

Then came the testimonials.

Relieved Symptoms

One man told how Barley Green had relieved his daughter-in-law of the symptoms of premenstrual syndrome--”She was a hellcat”--and his grandson of bed-wetting and temper tantrums. One woman said it had cured her husband of prostate cancer. Another credited it for making her daughter’s umbilical cord so thick during a recent pregnancy that the doctors who delivered her baby commented on it.

It’s all fodder for Hagiwara’s “green revolution,” as the pharmacologist calls his personal dream of making “the number-one health food product in Japan” as popular in the United States as caffeinated beverages.

Oxnard is at the front lines in that revolution. Hagiwara’s Osaka-based Japan Natural Foods Co. is building a 32,000-square-foot plant in Seagate Industrial Park on Colonia Road and plans to plant 150 acres of barley at Rice Road and Channel Islands Boulevard.

If the $24-million operation that is due to open next month and begin production in January succeeds, Hagiwara plans to boost the number of employees from 35 in the first year to 100 in two years, and double local barley plantings in three years, he said through an interpreter.

With the savings he hopes to realize by manufacturing Barley Green stateside, Hagiwara said he plans to lower the cost of the drink, putting it in reach of more consumers and driving sales from a projected $20 million in the first year to $50 million in the third year.

International Shipments

Through Port Hueneme, the Oxnard plant would ship to Canada, Europe and Australia.

Plans eventually include opening a larger factory in Atlanta, and planting up to 9,000 acres of barley nearby. There also is talk of making powdered-beverage mixes of green peppers, cucumbers, even yogurt.

“I’m testing the waters,” said Hagiwara, a frail, exceedingly polite man of 62.

The Oxnard plant appears to be well on its way. On a recent morning, construction crews were preparing the ground for a large loading dock, installing electrical ducts leading to three conveyor belts for barley mashing, and installing a two-story vat used in drying the juice.

Less than two miles away, tractors worked 149 acres most recently planted in strawberries. Five varieties of barley grew on a half-acre test plot nearby.

The road to Barley Green was not as smooth.

Hagiwara said he became disenchanted after the failure of a company that he built around a cure for athlete’s foot that contained an unlikely and toxic ingredient--mercury.

At the time, Hagiwara said he was unaware of the heavy metal’s harmful effects but soon gained firsthand experience. His hair turned prematurely gray, and he lost his teeth and “the physical and mental strength to direct my staff.”

Visiting a Japanese farm 23 years ago, he was struck by the fact that it had been planted not in rice, as was the practice in the region, but in a grain, which varies according to the version of the story. Sometimes it’s rye, other times, barley.

Whatever the crop, the farmer explained that he could earn three times more growing an acre of it, rather than an acre of rice, because his cows yielded so much milk when they ate the greens. That was a revelation to Hagiwara.

“I was astonished to learn of the ability of green leaves to create so much vitality and energy,” he said.

Inspired to tap such a force, Hagiwara said he pulverized and sampled hundreds of greens--from loquat leaves to bamboo grass and chickweeds--before settling on the leaves of barley.

Extraction Technique

The plant’s extraordinary benefits for humans had not been discovered earlier, he said, because it takes the special extraction technique that he developed.

Hagiwara introduced the drink in Japan in 1970. Ten years later, he brought it to the United States, where it was first marketed by a Salt Lake City firm that, according to AIM officials, was adulterating the product with flavorings.

In 1982, a Nampa, Ida., farmer decided to pick up where the Utah firm left off and founded AIM, parlaying a $500,000 investment into half of a business expected to gross $24 million this year through 78,000 distributors. The company also sells a controversial product called Willard’s Water, which is supposed to make “water wetter” for health purposes, as well as a string of other products developed by Hagiwara, including bath salts whose promotion literature promises that its user will “feel like an existentialist philosopher.”

AIM President Dennis Itami, a third-generation Japanese-American with an easy manner and self-deprecating laugh, was looking, he said, for “a chance to help a lot of people” in the wake of the freakish accident that killed his two sons, aged 11 and 12, a year earlier. They were buried alive after tumbling into a hopper of recently harvested grain. The grain, it turns out, was barley.

“It seems so ironic that God wanted to take the boys with the same product that fills a void in so many people’s lives,” said Itami, 42.

Expensive Land

Hagiwara then got the urge to fill the void in more people’s lives. Land, he explained, is expensive in Japan, so he looked to the United States. Company officials said that they decided on Oxnard because extensive testing of its soil, air quality and climate found it to be superior to sites considered in ten other states.

They also acknowledged that only Oxnard offered a financing arrangement for the plant, which was approved unanimously by Oxnard’s City Council in 1987.

At the time, Mayor Nao Takasugi hailed the Oxnard plant as an opportunity to “maintain the agricultural tradition that we cherish in this area.”

“Frankly, we aren’t aware of any of these problems,” Takasugi said Monday. “We didn’t get into their so-called claims. I’m sorry to hear this.”

But Barley Green marketers are convinced of their product’s value. They invoke Hagiwara’s reputation, pointing to a contract that he and his son, Hideaki Hagiwara, have with UC San Diego to develop cancer antibodies.

‘It’s--I’m being visionary here--going to win a Nobel Prize,” said AIM Vice President Price. “He’s that sort of scientist.”

Drug Dispute

The Hagiwaras reached their agreement with UCSD after a bizarre dispute over a possible anti-cancer drug that Hideaki Hagiwara helped developed as a postdoctoral fellow there in the early 1980s using cells from his own cancer-ridden mother.

University officials said he violated a UCSD policy against removing biological materials from a lab when he took the cells back to Japan in 1982 to try to treat his mother and to patent the drug for his father’s Hagiwara Institute of Health in Osaka.

The younger Hagiwara said the university had agreed at the outset of the experiment to allow him to treat his mother with the drug and allow him to continue research on the drug in Japan.

The two parties eventually agreed that the university would retain patent rights on the drug and that the Hagiwaras would have an exclusive license to market it in Japan and other Asian countries.

The elder Hagiwara’s supporters also point to an award he received in 1987 from the Japanese Ministry of Science and Technology.

Business Award

However, the Ministry of Science and Technology award also went to 58 other recipients that year, according to Takao Kuramochi, a science and technology official with the Japanese Embassy in Washington. He also said the award recognizes achievements in business, not scientific research.

Hagiwara’s critics focus not so much on his reputation as on his claims about Barley Green’s protein, vitamin and enzyme content.

Barley Green’s distributors point proudly to the product’s high content of amino acids, considered the building blocks of protein. But, because those elements do not occur in balanced proportions, the drink actually contains little complete protein, said Jarvis, of the National Council Against Health Fraud.

Past company literature has tallied 16 vitamins in the drink, but does not mention that the existence of two of them, Vitamin P and Vitamin F, are no longer accepted by the medical community. The literature also ignored the fact that a third, B15, can only be manufactured by the body itself, Jarvis said.

AIM claims that the drink contains superoxide dismutase, an enzyme that has been the subject of longevity research. But it doesn’t cite the contention of many medical researchers that the enzyme’s benefits--if it has any--are lost when it is digested orally, Jarvis said.

Green Pigment

Barley Green’s distributors also point proudly to the drink’s content of chlorophyll, the green pigment in plants that is chemically similar to human blood. But Jarvis said that it has no role in human nutrition and that chlorophyll’s benefits, if there are any, would be lost in digestion, anyway.

“Eat your broccoli,” Jarvis said. “You’d be better off.”

But AIM officials stand firm. “Barley Green is an excellent source of protein,” Price said. As for the product’s vitamin content, the company no longer makes specific claims, he said. However, at least one Japanese medical society recognizes the two vitamins in dispute as well as two others that have failed to make the American Academy of Sciences’ list, he said.

As disputed as the benefits of superoxide dismutase are, two Mexican researchers have found elevated levels of the enzyme in the blood of people given it in tablet form, giving credence to company claims, said Eugene Wagner, a Barley Green distributor who also is a professor of biochemistry at Ball State University in Muncie, Ind.

The studies have yet to be duplicated in the United States because “there’s a big resistance to these kinds of things in the medical community,” he said.

Meanwhile, U.S. researchers have found that the excrement of people who ingested chlorophyll is less odorous than otherwise, he said. “There wouldn’t be an effect if chlorophyll weren’t absorbed by the blood,” he added.

Company View

Company officials portray Jarvis as a “prejudiced and very vindictive” man who has targeted them unfairly for criticism.

“He’s made it real clear that he wants to close down anyone who manufactures food supplements,” Price said. “He’s an enemy of health food. He’s anti-anything outside established medicine. He doesn’t have personal experience with the product, and Barley Green is the kind of product that you have to use yourself to know about.”

Retorts Jarvis: “I’m not biased. I just believe if you’re going to make claims you should be able to prove them.”

But at least one U.S. scientist, Takayuki Shibamoto, believes that the medical establishment is being closed-minded in focusing the fact that barley has no proven extraordinary medicinal or nutritional value. “This is no the way for scientists to approach this,” said Shibamoto, a professor of environmental toxicology at UC Davis who studies naturally occuring medicines and hopes to receive a grant from Hagiwara to study barley. “It closes the door on future inquiry.”

Shibamoto said it is not farfetched to believe that barley greens may be beneficial.

“I don’t know about the product, but barley greens have biologically important enzymes which regulate the entire human system,” he said. “My belief is that plants and natural products must contain some material which can cure cancer. Throughout history human beings have been using plants for treatment of diseases, and there already are naturally occuring drugs such as penicillin.”

Barley Green’s distributors couldn’t agree more. They gave Hagiwara three standing ovations during his appearance--before, during and after a lengthy speech. Later they rushed to be photographed with the creator of the “ideal fast food.”

“It worked on me great,” beamed Frieda Larson, 86. “Every problem I’ve ever had has left.”

COUNTERPOINT

“The juice of any plant is nutritious but to say that the juice of barley greens are especially nutritious is pure garbage,” said Wayne R. Bidlack, associate professor of pharmacology and nutrition at USC.