Garlic

Garlic has been used as a food and a medicine for thousands of years.

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 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.

Cheap odourless garlic supplements may well contain no active ingredients, because these have been processed out to make them odourless. Unfortunately these garlic supplements appear to have been used in some of the published papers.

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.