by Vera Tweed
For more than 4,000 years, garlic has been used as medicine. Athletes at the first Olympics in ancient Greece ate it to enhance performance, and both Greek and Roman soldiers believed it boosted strength and courage. More recently, scientists have been finding that the odiferous bulb can keep us in good health, and more than 3,800 scientific articles have been published about garlic since 1945.
[Sponsor link: Unnatural Cell Growth Healing Protocol]
Eating one or two cloves each day is one option, but it may not appeal to your taste buds – or to those within smelling distance.
Odorless Alternative
Supplements are a simple alternative. One particular type of supplement — aged garlic extract — has been studied more than any other. Made from organically grown garlic and aged without the use of heat, it’s odorless and proven to help the heart, improve resistance to colds, reduce damage to blood vessels from elevated blood sugar or diabetes, and reduce risk for colorectal cancers and Alzheimer’s disease.
Heart Help
Studies have shown that aged garlic extract lowers blood pressure, cholesterol, and triglycerides. But its greatest benefit may be reducing arterial plaque, also called calcification of arteries, which many integrative physicians believe to be the most reliable predictor of ill health and death from heart disease.
Dr. Matthew Budoff, a cardiologist, researcher, and associate professor of medicine at the UCLA School of Medicine, is an expert in scanning technology that measures plaque in arteries. In a study published in the Journal of Nutrition, he examined the effects of aged garlic extract on people with heart disease who were taking statins.
“I found that the amount of calcification in the arteries of a person with elevated cholesterol can increase by 40 percent in one year,” he says. “Yet, when my team and I gave patients 1,200 mg of aged garlic extract a day, they slowed the growth of their plaque by 66 percent in one year.”
There were no adverse interactions between the statin medications and the garlic supplement. However, statins taken alone without garlic supplementation did not stop growth of arterial plaque.