Garlic Information.

Garlic is one of the oldest known medicinal plants and records show it was used in India 5,000 years ago and in China 3,000 years ago. It has been credited with the ability to lower cholesterol, reduce heart disease, lower blood pressure and fight off colds. Garlic can be used in cooking or taken as a supplement, and there are odour free products available if you have a problem with the smell.

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Garlic Information
Related Sections : Supplements For Heart & Circulation : Preventing Colds & Flu ::

Garlic

Garlic has been used as a food and a medicine for thousands of years. It is one of the oldest known medicinal plants and records show it was used in India 5,000 years ago and in China 3,000 years ago

Garlic has been extensively studied and thousands of research papers have been published about its health properties. Many published papers have found little or no evidence that it works, but this is now thought to be because many of the garlic supplements used did not contain much of the active ingredients, because they are all very easily destroyed or lost in processing because they are either chemically delicate or very volatile and lost to the air.

Garlic is still not fully understood. It used to be thought that the active ingredient was allicin, and most garlic supplements were standardised for their allicin content. However, the whole picture now appears to be much more complicated, and there is probably not a single active ingredient but several, so the best garlic supplements will be the ones that have had minimal processing, and contain as much of the original garlic as possible. Different garlic supplements contain different ingredients, and there is no common standard. This may be why the published results on garlic differ so widely.

Odourless garlic supplements are popular as they don't produce the taste and odour of the full garlic products, but they may be lacking in some of the active ingredients, because these have been processed out to make them odourless.

Garlic thins the blood and lowers "bad" LDL cholesterol levels, and some report show an increase in "good" LDL levels. These effects improve your cholesterol levels and help protect against heart disease. The effect of garlic on atherosclerosis, the furring up of the blood vessels, has been behind much of the research done on garlic, and many of the published results have shown a significant benefit.

Garlic is rich in antioxidants, and the antioxidant effect is probably behind many of its beneficial actions.

Protecting your lungs from flu virus attack is very important, because this can lead to the lung damage which leads to pneumonia, which is how most people who suffer from flu die. One research studyshowed that some sulphur-rich foods such as garlic, onions, broccoli, oats, corn, legumes, nuts and seeds naturally produce glutathione in lung cells which protects them from the damage caused by the M2 protein in the virus which causes the damage. (Reference - Plant-based antioxidants protect lungs from H1N1 and Antioxidants May Help Prevent Flu and Influenza virus M2 protein inhibits epithelial sodium channels by increasing reactive oxygen species).

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