Garlic has been considered an important medicine for thousands of years, everywhere from India to China to Egypt. Does the evidence show it lives up to this long reputation? In short: Yes. Prepared properly, garlic has some very nice health benefits.
In this post, you’ll find some of what it does for us. There’s so much to say on the subject that the growth, storage, and use of the herb will be in a separate post; part II of this series. I looked at dozens of journal articles for this piece; the citations given are representative of the general story.
Garlic has a surprising array of health benefits.
Garlic improves blood lipids, reducing the risk of heart attack, stroke, etc.
The second-most prescribed drug in the US (Crestor, one of the -statin class) is designed to improve blood lipids. Garlic does the same kinds of things: Lowers LDL cholesterol and triglycerides, in part by in inhibiting the key enzyme that your liver uses to make cholesterol.
It also makes blood lipids less likely to cause atherosclerosis and heart disease, by raising HDL cholesterol and reducing the oxidation of the LDL that encourages it to settle into nasty deposits in the arteries. (1,2,3,4,5,etc.)
See that nasty buildup in the arteries that feed the heart and other organs, looking like the gunk that clogs a drain? The things it does to your blood lipids slow the buildup of that gunk.
Garlic lowers blood pressure
Hypertension (high blood pressure) puts undue stress on the blood vessels, leading over time to more atherosclerosis, heart disease, and stroke; as well as damaging the vessels directly to promote blindness and kidney failure. It’s called the ‘silent killer’, and stress makes it worse. Garlic, however, makes it better. (4,5,6,7) Systolic blood pressure in particular is reduced.
Garlic improve blood sugar in diabetics
Blood sugar runs chronically high in the disease diabetes. This high blood sugar damages blood vessels, enhancing all sorts of nasty diseases like heart attack, kidney failure, blindness, and more.
Taking it helps brings the blood sugar down somewhat, and reduces its damage. (4,8,9) If the diabetic is taking the common oral drug metformin, the drug and the herb work together for even better results. (9)
There may be more…
It’s well known that people who eat a lot of garlic have lower rates of some kinds of cancer. It’s also well known that some specific compounds in garlic have anti-tumor actions in cell culture and animal tests. So does the herb in food or as a supplement actually have a usefully strong anti-cancer activity? That’s a trickier question.
People with garlic-rich diets, for example, also eat more vegetables than the average person; and vegetable intake by itself reduces cancer. Lots of chemicals that interfere with cancer cells in cell cultures or in animal models don’t work out when we try them on people. (10,11)
High quality human trials would be the only way to be sure it really works in people to prevent cancers, but those quality trials are so fiendishly expensive to run, there’s no clear answer yet.
If it were a patentable drug, some drug company would pony up for the change to charge thousands of dollars for it; but since it can be grown in the backyard no one stands to make enough money off of it to sponsor the trials.
Immune function
The same problem applies to reports that garlic supports immune function. It ramps up the activities of some kinds of immune cells, and some garlic compounds mimic compounds our immune system uses to communicate among its various parts. (10)
It has some compounds that interfere with microbial growth; both microbes that normally attack plants and some that normally attack humans (12) That makes it quite plausible that it’s useful in making our immune systems work better.
However, those effects may or may not play out when people eat garlic. Eating it didn’t help women with fungal vaginal infections, despite the fact that cell culture tests looked good. (13)
Blood lipids
Adding the blood lipid, blood pressure, and blood sugar effects, garlic has the opportunity to help well over half of the people over fifty in the U.S.; and more than thirty percent of adults in general. If that’s all there is, it’s still a marvelously useful treatment.
How strong are these effects? Reports vary (more on that in a bit), but many of these studies were getting statistically significant results even with pretty small sample sizes and good placebo controls. That’s a promising sign that it’s not some puny little change.
Even if the other proposed actions aren’t terribly useful, garlic looks like a good addition to a prepper’s medicine chest. Part II of this series will look at how to get that done: How to grow, prepare, and dose with garlic.
The Prepper’s Gluten Free Secret Super Storage Food: Rolled Oats
Resources
1) Bayan, L., Koulivand, P. H., & Gorji, A. (2014). Garlic: a review of potential therapeutic effects. Avicenna Journal of Phytomedicine, 4(1), 1–14.
2) Karin Ried, Catherine Toben, Peter Fakler; Effect of garlic on serum lipids: an updated meta-analysis, Nutrition Reviews, Volume 71, Issue 5, 1 May 2013, Pages 282–299, https://doi.org/10.1111/nure.12012
3) Arreola, R., Quintero-Fabián, S., López-Roa, R. I., Flores-Gutiérrez, E. O., Reyes-Grajeda, J. P., Carrera-Quintanar, L., & Ortuño-Sahagún, D. (2015). Immunomodulation and anti-inflammatory effects of garlic compounds. Journal of Immunology Research, 2015, 1-13. doi:10.1155/2015/401630
4) Pérez-Torres, I., Torres-Narváez, J., Pedraza-Chaverri, J., Rubio-Ruiz, M., Díaz-Díaz, E., del Valle-Mondragón, L., . . . Guarner-Lans, V. (2016). Effect of the aged garlic extract on cardiovascular function in metabolic syndrome rats. Molecules, 21(12), 1425. doi:10.3390/molecules21111425
5) Qidwai, W., & Ashfaq, T. (2013). Role of garlic usage in cardiovascular disease prevention: An evidence-based approach. Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine, 2013, 1-9. doi:10.1155/2013/125649
6) Kwak, J. S., Kim, J. Y., Paek, J. E., Lee, Y. J., Kim, H., Park, D., & Kwon, O. (2014). Garlic powder intake and cardiovascular risk factors: A meta-analysis of randomized controlled clinical trials. Nutrition Research and Practice, 8(6), 644-654. doi:10.4162/nrp.2014.8.6.644
7) Schwingshackl, L., Missbach, B., & Hoffmann, G. (2016). An umbrella review of garlic intake and risk of cardiovascular disease. Phytomedicine : International Journal of Phytotherapy and Phytopharmacology, 23(11), 1127-1133. doi:10.1016/j.phymed.2015.10.015
8) Kwak, J. S., Kim, J. Y., Paek, J. E., Lee, Y. J., Kim, H., Park, D., & Kwon, O. (2014). Garlic powder intake and cardiovascular risk factors: A meta-analysis of randomized controlled clinical trials. Nutrition Research and Practice, 8(6), 644-654. doi:10.4162/nrp.2014.8.6.644
9) Nasri, H. (2013). Renoprotective effects of garlic. Journal of Renal Injury Prevention, 2(1), 27–28. http://doi.org/10.12861/jrip.2013.09
10) Arreola, R., Quintero-Fabián, S., López-Roa, R. I., Flores-Gutiérrez, E. O., Reyes-Grajeda, J. P., Carrera-Quintanar, L., & Ortuño-Sahagún, D. (2015). Immunomodulation and anti-inflammatory effects of garlic compounds. Journal of Immunology Research, 2015, 1-13. doi:10.1155/2015/401630
11) Kim, J. Y., & Kwon, O. (2009;2008;). Garlic intake and cancer risk: An analysis using the food and drug administration’s evidence-based review system for the scientific evaluation of health claims. The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 89(1), 257-264. doi:10.3945/ajcn.2008.26142
12) Wallock-Richards, D. et al. (2016). Garlic Revisited: Antimicrobial Activity of Allicin-Containing Garlic Extracts against Burkholderia cepacia Complex. PLOS ONE | DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0112726.
13) Watson, C., Grando, D., Fairley, C., Chondros, P., Garland, S., Myers, S., & Pirotta, M. (2014). The effects of oral garlic on vaginal candida colony counts: A randomised placebo controlled double‐blind trial. BJOG: An International Journal of Obstetrics & Gynaecology, 121(4), 498-506. doi:10.1111/1471-0528.12518