While green foods comprise a wide variety of different types, from single celled algae to flowering plants, they all share one thing in common, chlorophyll. The benefits of various green foods seem related to their chlorophyll content, perhaps as a result of specific beneficial substances, such as carotenoids and flavonoids, that are often found together with chlorophyll. Chlorophyll is known to help cleanse the body, fight infection, help heal wounds, and promote the health of the circulatory, digestive, immune, and detoxification systems.

Although chlorophyll is a volatile compound, the chlorophyll in BarleyGreen is stabilized by the gentle extraction and spray-drying processes. While the mechanism is unclear, chlorophyll consumption may increase the number of red blood cells and, therefore, increase oxygen utilization by the body. Interestingly, the chlorophyll molecule is similar in structure to the heme molecule of the oxygen-carrying protein, hemoglobin.