Garlic health benefits are unique it has properties that can impact some of our 21st century health problems in dramatic way. It is amazing that a simple food can have such profound effects on our health and well-being.
What scientist are discovering daily just how potent some of our nearly 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 is even a more applicable statement our 21st century health problems.
Garlic health benefits probably more than any other food, fits into Hippocrates description of and ideal food. It is extremely nutritious and has health-promoting and disease-preventing properties that have only recently been closely examined and accepted.
Where Does it Grow
Garlic grows in just about 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 one clove in the right conditions, it will produce a bulb or head with eight to twenty cloves. 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 in Egypt.
They can be accurately dated back to 3750 B.C.,well before time of the Pharaohs. The models were made of unbaked, whitewashed clay with as many as nine pods to a central globe.
Experts have remarked on the excellent, lifelike reproductions.
Garlic for Vibrant Health
The Greeks of Athens and Knossos reveled in garlic health benefits.
It was around this time that it began to have a defined health and medical connotation. The Greeks held that it gave them vibrant health and energy.
Aristotle described it as a tonic to invigorate and restore health. Olympic athletes used garlic to enhance strength and endurance.
Garlic is good for increasing the flow of urine (diuretic). Relaxing the stomach (digestive aid) with candida infection and aiding a cough with pus or signs of suppuration in a sick man (antibiotic) clears 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) clears the arteries (lowers blood fats, cholesterol and triglycerides) is cancer preventive and even helps to lower high blood pressure.
Garlic health benefits are so numerous it is hard to write about them all.
Garlic’s Historical Record
If garlic did not work and work well, it would have fallen out of the historical record at some point long ago. but garlic has a medical history more solid than just about any other substance we know. It has truly stood the test of time.
Garlic’s Unique Taste and Smell
How does garlic suddenly develop its characteristic taste and smell? If you take a clove of garlic, peel it, get real close and take a sniff. There is no odor. You can lick the uncut clove and there is no taste.
If you boil it without cutting it, you get a vegetable taste. The strong odor and taste of garlic appear only after it has been cut or crushed. What is the strong smelly compound, and what is the mystery of its production?
Its the allicin in the garlic when it is crushed or cut the garlic releases this chemical and that is where the strong taste and smell come from.
Garlic and Resveratrol
Garlic is a powerful antioxidant and like Resveratrol is an anti aging compound. And like resveratrol naturally helps to lower cholesterol. Any vitamin or substance that protects the cells is anti aging but Resveratrols anti aging properties are a little different than any other compound because it activates the sirtuins inside our cells and turns on the longevity genes inside our cells.
A Diet Rich in Natural Foods Can Increase Longevity
In different parts of the world people don’t suffer from the same diseases we Americans do.
Like the French who have half the heart disease we do and eat four times the fat that we do they drink a glass of red wine with almost every meal and it is the resveratrol in the red wine that helps prevent heart disease.
The Greenland Eskimos diet is mostly whale blubber and they don’t suffer the same heart disease either because they also get twelve grams of fish oil (omega-3s) in there diet every day.
The Ikarians have a diet rich in natural foods and garlic health benefits, helps prevent old age disease just like how Resveratrol slows the aging process.
And the Ikarians suffer 20 percent fewer cases of cancer than do Americans and have about half our rate of heart disease and one-ninth our rate of diabetes.
Most astonishing of all: among the islanders over 90 whom the team studied-about one-third of Ikaria’s population who are 90 and older-there was virtually no Alzheimer’s disease or other dementia.
In the United States more than 40 percent of people over 90 suffer some form of this devastating ailment.
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