Barley

Barley carries more fructan than wheat, and longer chains with it. It reaches the diet by two routes that look unrelated: pearl barley in soup, and malt - so barley malt extract, malt vinegar and beer all trace back here.

Barley carries longer fructan chains than wheat, and more of them. Longer chains ferment further down the colon and more slowly, which changes the timing of the response rather than its size.

Barley contains gluten as hordein. It reaches far more products than the grain itself does - malt, malt extract, malt vinegar and most beers are all barley, and none of them says barley on the front. It is one of the three cereals the coeliac associations prohibit outright, with wheat and rye. Two consequences are worth knowing: a beer may be labelled gluten free only at 20 ppm or less, while a GLUTEN REMOVED beer brewed from barley must still state that it contains barley — and oats, which are not on that list, are prohibited in the legislation anyway, though AFDIAG records that uncontaminated oats would be edible by almost all coeliacs.

Barley is low in salicylate as a grain. Barley matters more on the gluten axis than this one.

Barley is a low-nickel cereal, and most of it is eaten pearled - the polishing that removes the hull takes the outer layers where trace metals sit.

Barley bran was one of the three cereals Israr measured, and across that set total oxalate ran 33 to 199 mg/100 g with 14 to 79 of it soluble — so none of the three is at zero. No figure for barley alone is published, so this level is a ranking rather than a measurement.