Garlic To Go
Garlic To Go
You may have heard that garlic provides some heart health benefits – especially for management of high blood pressure. But you may have also heard that garlic studies tend to vary widely in their results – some showing benefits, others not.
New research suggests a reason why those results are varied, and why garlic actually IS a heart healthy dietary choice.
Clove crush
Root? Vegetable? Herb? Spice? Ask people what category garlic falls into and you’ll probably hear each of those answers at least once – but only one is correct. Garlic is a vegetable, in the allium family along with leeks and onions.
But garlic has a unique characteristic. When you crush a garlic clove, a cascade of chemicals is released, activating the components of garlic that are believed to provide healthy benefits such as protection against bacterial and fungal infections, blood clots, and high blood pressure.
Recent laboratory research at the University of Alabama reveals the likely mechanism that makes garlic a heart helper. And according to a HealthDay News report, the UA team began their research just as you might begin making a pungent marinara sauce: They crushed the garlic.
The published study (in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) is a bit weighed down with highly technical chemistry jargon. So I’ll do what we laymen d I’ll keep it simple. After exposing human red blood cells to crushed garlic, the UA tests showed that the cells converted garlic-derived components called organic polysulfides into hydrogen sulfide, a molecule that protects blood vessels by reducing inflammation and relaxing vessel walls.
It’s all in the preparation
So if hydrogen sulfide helps keep blood vessels elastic and healthy, and garlic works with the body to create hydrogen sulfide, why are some garlic studies inconclusive or show little benefit for the heart?
According to David Kraus, Ph.D., the lead UA researcher, if garlic is not prepared properly its benefits are negligible or lost altogether. And the key, apparently, is in the crushing. Dr. Kraus told HealthDay that he and his team not only crushed the garlic used in their study, they allowed about 15 minutes for the resulting chemical cascade to fully take effect.
Dr. Kraus also noted that some garlic trials have tested the vegetable as an LDL-lowering agent. Such research is bound to fail, he says, because the trials are looking for garlic activity that he calls “impossible.” Another nutrition researcher confirmed this, telling HealthDay that hydrogen sulfide has no effect on cholesterol.
Of course, the UA study only gives us an insight into the effects of properly prepared fresh garlic. But according to Simon Mills and Kerry Bone in their textbook on botanical medicine, “Principles and Practice of Phytotherapy,” when garlic is dried in powered form at low temperatures, the garlic enzyme allinase and the active compound alliin remain intact, converting to allicin in the digestive tract, which is the same chemical chain of events that follows the crushing of a garlic clove.
Sources:
“Hydrogen Sulfide Mediates the Vasoactivity of Garlic” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Published online before print 10/19/07, pnas.org
“Garlic May Ward Off Heart Woes” Ed Edelson, HealthDay News, 10/16/07, healthday.com
