So, should we all take garlic supplements to maintain healthy hearts and perfect blood pressure, as well as to protect us against colds and flu’s?
Not necessarily, says Dr Kraus. Earlier studies into garlic’s health benefits had failed to produce uniform results mainly because of the way garlic was prepared . “If you prepare it in certain ways, you can lose the compounds that cause it to release hydrogen sulfide,” he says. In fact, ‘odorless garlic’ supplements are probably a complete waste of money, since the odor is a key to the herb’s efficacy. Dr Krause suggests we take our garlic the way the ancients did - as a food. Cooked garlic retains much of it’s efficacy, but naturally raw is better.
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How much raw garlic should we eat ? How about five or six cloves a day? Dr Krause told the radio listeners that he and his fellow researchers had a dinner club and came up with all sorts of ideas for eating that much garlic. For example?
“We take a small tub of hummus, and you can take an entire bulb of garlic and chop it up and put it in there and then spread that on bread; you can put it on vegetables, or in vegetable dips, you can use it on pasta, you can use it in a number of different ways. And in one bulb of garlic there’s probably 15 or 20 cloves present.”
If you plan on following Dr Krause’s culinary advice, don’t forget the parsley afterwards. A few springs of parsley (Petroselinum sativum) chewed after eating garlic takes most of the smell away. Be sure your friends and family enjoy the smell of garlic, before you incorporate it too enthusiastically in your diet.
Warning: Garlic Is a Powerful Blood Thinner. Garlic must be used with caution by people who have a bleeding disorder, or are on blood thinning medication such as aspirin or warfarin, because it is a powerful blood thinner. Other side effects include bad breath, body odor, heartburn, upset stomach, and allergic reactions.
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