The Many Health Benefits Of Garlic

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Today’s 30-Second Summary

If you don’t have time to read the whole email today, here are some key takeaways:

• Garlic has many health benefits, especially:

  • For healthy blood pressure

  • For reducing LDL (bad) cholesterol

  • For gut health

  • For immune health

  • For slowing aging and reducing dementia risk

• Garlic’s most relevant active compound, allicin, isn’t very stable

  • It breaks down soon after garlic is cut/crushed

    • So fresh is better than garlic powder etc

  • It breaks down somewhat during cooking

    • So raw is better than cooked

      • Still love cooking with garlic? So do we! Just use more. It’s a fine excuse 😉 

• Today’s sponsor Fitt Insider is what it sounds like—an insider news source for the world of fitness. It’s free, and we recommend it!

Read on to learn about these things and more…

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The Many Health Benefits of Garlic

We’re quite confident you already know what garlic is, so we’re going to leap straight in there with some science today:

First, let’s talk about allicin

Allicin is a compound in garlic that gives most of its health benefits. A downside of allicin is that it’s not very stable, so what this means is:

• Garlic is best fresh—allicin breaks down soon after garlic is cut/crushed

  • So while doing the paperwork isn’t fun, buying it as bulbs is better than buying it as granules or similar

• Allicin also breaks down somewhat in cooking, so raw garlic is best

  • Our philosophy is: still use it in cooking as well; just use more!

• Supplements (capsule form etc) use typically use extracts and potency varies (from not great to actually very good)

Read more about that:

• Short-term heating reduces the anti-inflammatory effects of fresh raw garlic extracts

• Allicin Bioavailability and Bioequivalence from Garlic Supplements and Garlic Foods

Now, let’s talk benefits…

Benefits to heart health

Garlic has been found to be as effective as the drug Atenolol at reducing blood pressure:

Effects of Allium sativum (garlic) on systolic and diastolic blood pressure in patients with essential hypertension

It also lowers LDL (bad cholesterol):

Lipid-lowering effects of time-released garlic powder tablets in double-blinded placebo-controlled randomized study

Benefits to the gut

We weren’t even looking for this, but as it turns out, as an add-on to the heart benefits…

Garlic lowers blood pressure in hypertensive subjects, improves arterial stiffness and gut microbiota: A review and meta-analysis

Benefits to the immune system

Whether against the common cold or bringing out the heavy guns, garlic is a booster:

• Preventing the common cold with a garlic supplement: a double-blind, placebo-controlled survey

• Supplementation with aged garlic extract improves both NK and γδ-T cell function and reduces the severity of cold and flu symptoms: a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled nutrition intervention

Benefits to the youthfulness of body and brain

Garlic is high in antioxidants that, by virtue of reducing oxidative stress, help slow aging. This effect, combined with the cholesterol and blood pressure benefits, means it may also reduce the risk of Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia:

• Antioxidant health effects of aged garlic extract

• Effects of garlic consumption on plasma and erythrocyte antioxidant parameters in elderly subjects

• Garlic reduces heart disease and dementia risk

There are more benefits too…

That’s all we have time to dive into study-wise today, but for the visually-inclined, here are yet more benefits to garlic (at a rate of 3–4 cloves per day):

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An incredible awesome recipe using lots of garlic:

• Take small potatoes (still in their skins), cut in half

• Add enough peeled cloves of garlic so that you have perhaps a 1:10 ratio of garlic to potato by mass

• Boil (pressure-cooking is ideal) until soft, and drain

• Keeping them in the pan, add a lashing of olive oil, and any additional seasonings per your preference (consider black pepper, rosemary, thyme, parsley)

• Put a lid on the pan, and holding it closed, shake the pan vigorously

  • Note: if you didn’t leave the skins on, or you chopped much larger potatoes smaller instead of cutting in half, the potatoes will break up into a rough mash now. This is actually also fine and still tastes (and honestly, looks) great, but it is different, so just be aware, so that you get the outcome you want.

• The garlic, which—unlike the potatoes—didn’t have a skin to hold it together, will now have melted over the potatoes like butter

You can serve like this (it’s delicious already) or finish up in the oven or air-fryer or under the grill, if you prefer a roasted style dish (an amazing option too).

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Do you ever learn of a new health kick, and wish dearly you’d known about it sooner? Fitt Insider’s newsletter really specializes in delivering that—getting cutting edge health and fitness news out to its subscribers.

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More to come tomorrow!

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The Energy Plan: Eat Smart, Feel Strong, Perform at Your Peak - by James Collins

There's a lot of conflicting advice out there about how we should maintain our energy levels, for example:

• Eat fewer carbs!

• Eat more carbs!

• Eat slow-release carbs!

• Eat quick-release carbs!

• Practise intermittent fasting!

• Graze constantly throughout the day!

• Forget carbs and focus on fats!

• Actually it's all about B-vitamins!

...and so on.

What Collins does differently is something much less-often seen:

Here, we're advised on how to tailor our meals to our actual lifestyle, taking into account the day we actually have each day. For example:

• What will our energy needs be for the day?

• Will our needs be intense, or long, or both, or neither?

• What kind of recovery have we had, or do we need, from previous activities?

• Do we need to replace lost muscle glycogen, or are we looking to trim the fat?

• Are we doing a power-up or just maintenance today?

Rather than bidding us have a five-way spreadsheet and do advanced mathematics for every meal, though, Collins has done the hard work for us. The book explains the various principles in a casual format with a light conversational tone, and gives us general rules to follow.

These rules cover what to do for different times of day... and also, at different points in our life (the metabolic needs of a 13-year-old, 33-year-old, and 83-year-old, are very different!). That latter's particularly handy, as a lot of books assume an age bracket for the reader, and this one doesn't.

In short: a great book for anyone who wants to keep their energy levels up (throughout life's ups and downs in activity) without piling on the pounds or starving oneself.

Click here to check out The Energy Plan on Amazon and fuel your days better!

Wishing you wonderful week ahead,

The 10almonds Team