A Preventative Garlic Cancer Treatment At Meal Time

A while back I shared with you a fairly interesting post on the benefits using of raw crushed garlic in your food as opposed to the cooked variety. Check the story out for the entire details but the gist of the findings were this:

Raw crushed garlic supports healthy a immune response in your body because the crushing/mincing (exposure of the garlic to air) produces allicin and diallyl sulfides which go on to support your immune system. The raw factor comes in to play because the act of cooking the garlic wipes out the allicin sulfides which are the key driver of the positive immuno benefits.

Today I ran into a familiar train of thought in the medicinal uses of garlic. Garlic does not only support immuno response but it also fights cancer (which you could argue is something that an immune response system would do anyway).  The American Institute for Cancer Research has said that the same allicin sulfides (which appear after garlic is exposed to air - i.e. crushed) in garlic fight cancer but the sulfides are not fully formed until the garlic has been exposed to air for at least ten minutes. Best Life also reported on this finding and they put it like this:

If you eat of cook garlic too soon, the enzyme alliinase will not have time to create the anticancer compounds known as allyl sulfer compounds, decreasing the herb’s cancer-fighting abilities by more than 90 percent.

That is amazing! So to recap; if you are eating garlic for the medicinal value and for its cancer fighting properties you should do two things: crush it and let it sit for at least ten minutes before eating it. And secondly, you should eat it raw or close to it. If you cook it you will cook off the compounds that fight disease and if you eat it too fast you will eat it before the compounds that fight disease ever fully form.

By the way olive oil prevents cancer too; pair these ideas for an even more significant does of cancer risk reduction. :) Food science is so interesting!

...and for more information on disease prevention click through and browse around the archives.

Source
The American Institute for Cancer Research
Best Life, Oct. 2007

Healthy Immune Systems and Raw Crushed Garlic

Use Crushed Raw Garlic to Support a Healthy Immune System

In my home we do a lot of cooking and most every dish includes fresh crushed garlic and olive oil. There are countless studies suggesting the increased health benefits of including both of these ingredients in your home cooked meals, and more specifically garlic is known to support a healthy immune system.

You would expect to reap these benefits by including crushed garlic in your home cooking but Mary, over at Branches of Health informs us that our cooking techniques are likely diminishing the benefits we could be experiencing when we use garlic in our recipes.

Raw Garlic Benefits:

"When garlic is chopped or crushed, this action produces two sulfides, allicin sulfides and diallyl sulfides. These sulfides are what produce all the health benefits of garlic [a healthy immune system]. Roasted garlic has no medicinal value because it is whole and it has been cooked to a high temperature. Diallyl sulfides will survive cooking, but its medicinal value is not as high as the allicin sulfides. Cooking chopped garlic will degrade the allicin, and microwaving it will destroy it all together.

To get the best health benefits from garlic,chop the garlic or press it into some olive oil and leave it for about 15 minutes. Add it to the meal at the very end of cooking, or even to the plate once its been served. The smaller the pieces of garlic, the more sulfides produced and the more medicinal value it will have. Also, organic garlic bulbs will have a stronger taste, which means more sulfur content resulting in more medicinal value."

Cooking With Raw Garlic

This information is big news to me as my wife and I always crush and mince our garlic and then sauté it with whatever our meal calls for. Considering this information I might hold off on adding the crushed garlic to the pan and instead use it as a raw garnish when plating.

You can read more about the health benefits of Garlic over on Mary’s blog and more about supporting a healthy immune system here on How To Live Longer in my post on increasing T-Cell Count with mushrooms.