How Amazing Is Garlic?  Let Me Count the Ways

Garlic Versus the Developed World's #1 and #2 Killers

The research on Greenmedinfo.com shows garlic has value in 167 health conditions or disease symptoms, but the greatest density of research indicates garlic's role in preventing and/or treating Cardiovascular Disease and Cancers, the two primary causes of death within high-income countries.[27]   

This is an interesting finding. The drug industry has been fantasizing about a so-called 'polypill' for quite some time, an idea involving mixing various patented medicines together for a condition like heart disease (e.g. blood pressure, cholesterol, blood thinner), but to no avail. Patented chemicals have far too many side effects, so when you mix them together, you only compound their multitudinous chemical toxicities. Natural substances, on the other hand, and especially those which play a role in culinary traditions as "spices," appear to have the opposite karma. Namely, they have far more 'side benefits' than 'side effects.'

Garlic's cardioprotective effects include:

1.   Retards progression of arterial plaque[28] [29] [30]

2.   Beneficially decreases white adipose tissue, increases white adipose tissue around heart muscle.[31]

3.   Protects against clotting[32] [33]

4.   Positively modulates blood lipids[34],[35],[36]

5.   Vasodilator[37]

6.   Reduces blood pressure[38]

7.   Antioxidant[39]

8.   Endothelial Dysfunction[40] [41]

9.   Vascular Inflammation[42]

Here is a quick review of the cancers that garlic has been found to kill:

1.   Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia[43]

2.   Acute Myeloid Leukemia[44]

3.   Basal Cell Carcinoma[45]

4.   Breast Cancer[46],[47]

5.   Cervical Cancer[48]

6.   Colon Cancer[49]

7.   Endometrial Cancer[50] [51]

8.   Gastric Cancer[52] [53]

9.   Leukemia: Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia (CLL)[54]

10.     Liver Cancer[55] [56] [57]  [58]

11.     Lymphoma[59] [60]

12.     Melanoma[61

13.     Osteosarcoma[62]

14.     Pancreatic Cancer[63]

Garlic, like so many other complex foods, contains a wide range of phytocompounds that articulate at least 150 distinct physiological responses in the mammalian body (see our 157 pharmacological actions list on the Garlic Research page).

How can this be so?

One explanation is that all foods contain not only physical building blocks, e.g. carbs, proteins, lipids, and are not only a source of energy (caloric content), but contain gene and epigene regulatory information. There are 'packets' of energy and information contained within the conformational state of the biomolecules found within these plant tissues. Our co-evolution with the plant kingdom for the past half a billion years has resulted in the very genetic/molecular fabric of our body depending on certain key compounds from plants in our diet, delivered in natural form, not irradiated, overly-cooked, petrochemically-farmed. Garlic's ability to fit like a key, into many different types of locks (an impossible feat for monochemical 'magic bullets'), reflects an likely infinitely complex intelligence in the relationship between plant and animal species. Which speaks to how important foods are not simply as 'medicine,' but that from which our bodily health grows organically, and without which disease is a natural consequence.