The health benefits of garlic are unique. It has properties that can dramatically affect some of our 21st century health problems. It’s amazing that a simple meal can have such a profound impact on our health and well-being.
What scientists are discovering every day how powerful some of our almost forgotten natural foods can be. Hippocrates, the father of medicine and perhaps the greatest healer who ever lived, wrote some 2,500 years ago:
“Let food be your medicine – let your medicine be your food.”
Garlic the ideal food
That was a powerful statement then, and it’s an even more valid statement for our health problems in the 21st century.
Garlic probably has more health benefits than any other food, fits Hippocrates description and ideal food. It is extremely nutritious and has health-promoting and disease-preventing properties that have only recently been studied and recognized.
where does it grow
Garlic grows in almost every part of the world, in temperate, subtropical and tropical regions.
It is not grown from a seed, but from individual cloves.
If you plant a carnation in the right conditions, it will produce a bulb or head of eight to twenty carnations. The botanical name for garlic is Allium sativum.
The first appearance of garlic
The first appearance of garlic in history dates back over 6,000 years. In 1911, clay models of garlic bulbs were found in a tomb at Mahasna, Egypt.
They can be dated back to 3750 BC exactly. B.C., well before the time of the pharaohs. The models were made of unbaked whitewashed clay with up to nine pods on a central sphere.
Experts praise the excellent, lifelike reproductions.
Garlic for vibrant health
The Greeks of Athens and Knossos reveled in the health benefits of garlic.
It was around this time that it began to have a defined health and medical connotation. The Greeks believed that it gave them vibrant health and energy.
Aristotle described it as a tonic to strengthen and restore health. Olympic athletes used garlic to improve strength and endurance.
Garlic is good for increasing urinary flow (diuretic). Relaxing the stomach (digestion aid) in Candida infection and aiding a cough with pus or signs of suppuration in a sick man (antibiotic) Clearing the arteries (lowers blood fats, cholesterol and triglycerides) Candida infection and aiding a cough with pus or signs of Suppuration in a sick man (antibiotic) cleans the arteries (lowers blood lipids, cholesterol and triglycerides), prevents cancer and even helps reduce high blood pressure.
The health benefits of garlic are so numerous that it is difficult to write about them all.
Garlic’s Historical Record
If garlic didn’t work and work well, it would have disappeared from the historical record sometime long ago. but garlic has a more solid medical history than any other substance we know of. It really has stood the test of time.
Garlic’s unique taste and smell
How does garlic suddenly develop its distinctive taste and smell? If you take a clove of garlic, peel it, get up close and sniff it. There is no smell. You can lick the uncut carnation and there is no taste.
Cooking it without cutting it will give you a vegetal flavor. Garlic’s strong odor and flavor comes only after it has been cut or crushed. What is the strong smelly compound and what is the secret of its production?
It is the allicin in garlic, when crushed or cut the garlic releases this chemical and hence the strong taste and smell.
garlic and resveratrol
Garlic is a powerful antioxidant and, like resveratrol, an anti-aging compound. And like resveratrol, it naturally helps lower cholesterol. Any vitamin or substance that protects cells is anti-aging, but resveratrol’s anti-aging properties are a little different than any other compound because it activates the sirtuins in our cells and activates the longevity genes in our cells.
A diet rich in natural foods can increase longevity
In different parts of the world, people do not suffer from the same diseases as we Americans do.
Like the French, who have half the heart disease rate and eat four times the fat we eat, they drink a glass of red wine with almost every meal, and it’s the resveratrol in red wine that helps prevent heart disease.
The Greenland Eskimos feed mainly on whale blubber and they don’t suffer from the same heart disease either because they also get twelve grams of fish oil (omega-3 fatty acids) in their diet every day.
The Ikarians have a diet rich in natural foods and garlic’s health-promoting properties that help prevent aging diseases in the same way that resveratrol slows the aging process.
And the Ikarians get 20 percent fewer cases of cancer than Americans, and have about half our rate of heart disease and a ninth our rate of diabetes.
Most amazingly, among the islanders over 90 the team studied – about a third of Ikaria’s population who are 90 and older – there was virtually no Alzheimer’s disease or other dementias.
In the United States, more than 40 percent of people over the age of 90 have some form of this devastating disease.
Thanks to Allen R Partch
