Posted on 12/11/2002 12:58:13 PM PST by KriegerGeist
Life, Garlic, and the Pursuit of Healthiness
By Gailon Totheroh
CBN News Health & Science Reporter
Garlic can reduce cholesterol as much as 12 percent. For a person with cholesterol at 230, that could mean a decrease to a near normal level of 202
CBN.com – Garlic and similar vegetables may be the reason Chinese men have so little prostate cancer, according to a new study from the National Cancer Institute. Yet there are many contradictory reports on whether garlic supplements have health benefits.
Certainly history is full of garlic's medicinal use. And the latest research developments indicate garlic's active ingredient may become a major player on the health scene.
While garlic is a modern mainstay of Southern European cooking, it was also the cause of the world's first labor dispute, a fight between the pyramid workers and the pharaoh's pocketbook.
Peter Josling, B.Sc., from The Garlic Centre, said, "They were spending the equivalent of about $2 million a year. So they decided that they would stop the ration of daily garlic and the slaves apparently downed tools and refused to work on until their garlic ration was restored."
Why did the slaves cling closely to the cloves of garlic? Josling said, "One reason was to improve the quality of the food that they were given on a daily basis, but the other reason was to keep them free from disease."
Josling is a British chemist, known in the UK as the "garlic guru" and in Norway as the "garlic king." Also big on garlic was the late Varro Tyler, Purdue University's expert on medicinal herbs.
Tyler once said, "It has been shown effective in reducing blood lipids — that is cholesterol and triglycerides as well."
That means better heart health, and a hedge against the nation's number one disease.
Garlic can reduce cholesterol as much as 12 percent. For a person with cholesterol at 230, that could mean a decrease to a near normal level of 202. And triglycerides can drop as much as 15 percent. That’s as good as drugs without the side effects.
But garlic's advantage depends on the presence of the potent substance allicin, and allicin is only produced with the aid of a special enzyme in garlic. "The enzyme known as allinase that releases that active principle is inactivated by the stomach acid," Tyler said.
So without allinase, no allicin is produced and no heart benefits arise. Cooking also destroys allinase, so one solution is, eat raw garlic. That avoids the stomach acid problem, but not the social problem of volatile vapors invading the personal space of others.
Supplement manufacturers attack the problems by coating garlic pills. That helps keep the allinase away from stomach acid and the garlic odor away from your breath.
But the problem there is you still might not get much allicin. So what are the reasons? First, the necessary allinase is often lost in manufacturing, and second, it still may not make it past the stomach.
So Josling developed a patented process to avoid the allinase problem by producing pure allicin and putting it in a capsule. The product, Allimax, is the first on the market, and Josling readily acknowledges his financial interest.
He said, "All of the profit that we've made over the last five years on anything we've done — and that's all sorts of things — has been plowed back into proving that this material is as active as we say it is."
He does not deny most garlic products have some benefit, but says straight allicin is the wave of the future. In fact, many companies are working on manufacturing or extracting pure allicin, and no wonder.
Allicin fights all major types of infections:
* Bacterial infections such as streptococcus and E. Coli
* Viral infections such as the ones causing colds and herpes
* Fungal ones such as vaginal yeast infections
* And parasitic ones such as intestinal giardia
Before antibiotics, missionaries used to treat dysentery and intestinal worms with crushed garlic.
In World War I, medics applied garlic preparations to battle wounds for healing. In that tradition, Josling carried out a recent study on allicin vs. the common cold in Britain.
Among 146 volunteers, half took his allicin supplement and half took a placebo. Over three months of winter, the allicin group got 24 colds, the placebo half contracted 65 infections. The study also found the allicin group made speedier recoveries and were less likely to be re-infected after an initial cold.
Josling says this could boost businesses by reducing sick days in winter by 60 percent. "If there's only three of you in a business and one goes down with a cold, then the other two have got to work much harder 'til you get back. So, yeah there are lots of people that could benefit," he said.
Though it has yet to be firmly established through testing on people, allicin shows promise in fighting cancer, AIDS, stomach ulcers, diabetic complications and even anthrax. Josling said, "There will be a whole family of allicin-based products. We're just at the top of the pyramid, if you like."
At least as far back as the pharaohs, garlic has been in demand as a boon to health, now with the latest research and development, allicin, the active ingredient, is proving beneficial to health as well, especially as an antibiotic.
Unlike pharmaceutical antibiotics, allicin does not produce antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Those bacteria eventually make antibiotics useless, and that is what happened to penicillin.
In fact, Josling's research indicates that combining allicin with old antibiotics may resurrect their use and make them effective once again.
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