Garlic
You can use it to ward off vampires, of course - but what else does it do for you? Let’s look at the health benefits of garlic.
A medicine turned food favourite.
It’s funny; though we now love using garlic in all sorts of food all around the world, historically it was mainly used for its medicinal purposes. Even as far back as Hippocrates, who we usually count as the father of Western medicine, a lot of the health benefits of garlic (now confirmed by scientific and human-tested studies) were known and considered very important.
Garlic is closely related to onions and shallots. It contains very little calories, but some important components like Vitamin C, great for boosting your immune system, Vitamin B6, great for mood and brain health - and manganese, great for calcium absorption and bone health among many other things.
Garlic, as well as garlic supplements and garlic extract, can really help prevent, and also reduce the symptoms of, sickness - like the common cold. Lots of studies support this, so definitely worth having garlic be a part of your diet if you can, to help stay healthy and well!
Garlic can help reduce your blood pressure, and can improve your cholesterol levels - great news for your heart! The fact that garlic helps your blood and heart, as well as the antioxidants you get, can help reduce the risk of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease.
Garlic can help your heart perform better - studies testing this out on people with heart disease showed an increase in exercise capacity after consuming garlic oil over a period of time. It was actually the first “performance enhancer”, among the first Olympic athletes in ancient Greece! It might not help you win the 100m sprint now, but it does seem to reduce exercise-induced fatigue.
And here’s maybe the fact to rule them all for me: garlic can help detoxify heavy metals in the body. They did tests on workers in a car battery plant, and consuming more garlic reduced the lead levels in their body by 19%! It also reduced symptoms like high blood pressure and headaches.
Garlic also seems to help bone strength, maybe especially for women (by increasing oestrogen). It can (and this goes for onions, too) also have a positive effect on people with osteoarthritis.
So there you go! Pretty clear why people have been using garlic for so long, and amazing to think that they noticed the benefits so clearly without the clinical studies we can refer to now.
A last little warning is that garlic is high in FODMAPs, which are the naturally occurring sugars that don’t get digested well in the small intestine and therefore gets broken down in the large intestine instead. For some people, this causes digestive issues, bloating and pain - so for IBS sufferers for example, garlic is an ingredient you want to be careful using.
Do you like cooking with garlic? How do you use it in the kitchen? Message me on Instagram @TheFromScratchBody!
