How daily consumption of garlic can save your life

Garlic has been one of the main nutritional foods consumed by everyone on earth for thousands of years and probably including few animals too. It tastes good if you cook it right, but not a lot of people enjoy eating raw garlic because of its pungent and spicy taste. Although there are some people around the world who enjoy eating raw garlic and are not bothered by the strong taste.

According to the New York Times, Italy, Korea, and China consume about three pounds of raw garlic per person a year. In these countries, many people also consume pickled garlic to reduce much of the intense odor so they can go to work the next day and talk to their colleagues.

So what kind of benefits does garlic really have?

It might surprise you, but garlic has been used as a medicine for a long time, as far back as in Ancient Chinese and Indian medicine to help aid in respiration and digestion and also to treat leprosy and parasitic infestation In Ancient Egypt, garlic was included as part of a daily diet to restore strength to the working class involved in heavy labor when they were building the pyramids. During the excavation of King Tutankhamen’s tomb, cloves of garlic were found so either they used this garlic as jewelry or it was on their dietary.

Out of the many health benefits garlic has, it is a well known fact that garlic helps treat cardiovascular diseases. There are numerous clinical studies(Auer et al., 1989; Konig and Scineider, 1986; Petkov, 1979; Omar, 2013; Stabler et al., 2012) that have proved garlic helps to reduce blood pressure in more than 80% of patients diagnosed with high blood pressure.

Additionally, there are several groups of scientists who have studied the long-term effect of garlic on high-cholesterol diets in rabbits and have revealed a statistically significant reduction in athermanous lesions (about 50% ).

It has also been shown that garlic can significantly reduce serum cholesterol, triglyceride, and LDL cholesterol on hypercholesterolemic rats induced by high-cholesterol diet. We can go on and on about these clinical studies but we can clearly see that main benefits of garlic is on your heart, which is the most important organ in our body.

Roughly about 800,000 people die from cardiovascular disease each year and it’s 19.1 million death globally. Garlic is not a magic bullet to cure everything, but if you are suffering from any heart condition, putting some garlic in your diet doesn’t sound like a bad idea. You might lose some quality time with your colleagues, but it may save your life.

So what is the best way to eat garlic to get full health benefits out of it? And does cooking destroy all these benefits?

First, let’s find out what is in garlic. According to the USDA, one teaspoon of garlic contains this much nutrition ->

Depending on the size of each clove, it might be different but in general, one clove of garlic equals one teaspoon. But this nutritional information doesn’t really give us a good sense of how good garlic actually is for us.

What scientists believe as the best health component of garlic is the compound, Allicin. In it’s chemical breakdown, Allicin looks like a snake with head sticking out in the middle.

This little compound goes into your body and basically collaborates with many enzymes to protect you from certain diseases and also encourages other beneficial changes, including weight loss. There are many studies and clinical research that have proved Allicin can help reduce body weight, so maybe eating some extra garlic around the holiday season can help relieve some stress! Since there are such a broad range of biological activity Allicin instigates, it’s hard to list every effect it can have on you, but it seems like it can be a magic key ingredient we should pay attention to.

Now going back to looking at the nutritional value of garlic, it contains a large amount of Allicin; about 2.4 to 4.5 mg per gram in fact!

So now, going back to our first question, what is the best way to eat garlic to obtain the best health benefits, we need to first look at if Allicin is stable enough to sustain environments of high heat during the cooking process. There are many articles which suggest it’s relatively heat stable and some even suggest that it would be okay to cook after ten minutes of chopping, but according to certain journal, Allicin is quite heat unstable and many suggest that not just Allicin but many other good enzymes in garlic will be destroyed during the cooking process.

Unfortunately it seems that if you want to get the full benefits from garlic, eating it raw would be the best way to consume it. Maybe it will help to take it with honey like this person I saw from Tiktok.

Now let’s look at some other benefits.

Recent 10 to 20 years many literature papers came out with evidence that consuming garlic enhanced memory function and this is a great news for Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s patients who are suffering from memory loss. Unfortunately, we still don’t have treatment or drug that can cure Alzheimer and many people had been suffered over 115 years ever since it was officially described, but of course people had been suffering even before without knowing what it was.

Although there are a quite amount of researches for Alzheimer (not enough), scientists still have hard time to figure out what really causes this disease and understanding human brain is extremely complex that it won’t be a easy job to figure out, but a huge respects for all the scientist trying their best.

Just to simply put, based on all the research it comes down to certain proteins in our brain that misfolds and can’t function their role and most important they aggregates and become clump and causes problems in our brain. Although there are many researches going on with main two proteins (beta-Amyloid and Tau) it’s still a strong theory and we still have a long way to go to cure this disease.

Based on the paper came out 2019, scientists believe that garlic has effect on Aβ-induced neurotoxicity and cognitive impairment. We may not understand full mechanisms of action for garlic how it helps but there are clinical studies to prove that it does.

We can go on and on about how good garlic is, but I think you get the point and see the importance of considering garlic as part of your main diet. Hippocrates said “Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food”. We should really start finding the answer close to us first.