|
Spanish version
Italian version
Garlic Soup Made With 52 Cloves of Garlic
...Can
Defeat Colds, Flu and Even Norovirus
by John Summerly
January 20, 2013
from
PreventDisease Website
Forget the flu shot. A soup based on more than 50 cloves of garlic,
onions, thyme and lemon will destroy almost any virus that enters
its path including colds, flu and even
norovirus.
As we sneeze and cough our way through these dark months of
contagious nastiest, garlic is being hailed for its powers to halt
viruses in their tracks. It has gained its reputation as a virus
buster thanks to one of its chemical constituents,
allicin.
A recent and significant finding from Washington State University
shows that garlic is 100 times more effective than two popular
antibiotics at fighting disease causing bacteria commonly
responsible for food-borne illness.
When the garlic is crushed,
alliin becomes allicin.
Research shows that allicin helps lower
cholesterol and blood pressure and also helps prevents blood clots.
Garlic can also reduce the risk of developing atherosclerosis
(hardening of the arteries). Compounds in this familiar bulb kill
many organisms, including bacteria and viruses that cause earaches,
flu and colds.
Research indicates that garlic is also
effective against digestive ailments and diarrhea.
What's more, further studies suggest
that this common and familiar herb may help prevent the onset of
cancers.
'This chemical has been known for a
long time for its anti-bacterial and anti-fungal powers,' says
Helen Bond, a Derbyshire-based consultant dietitian and
spokeswoman for the British Dietetic Association.
'Because of this, people assume it is going to boost their
immune systems. Lots of people are simply mashing up garlic,
mixing it with olive oil and spreading it on bread.
'But how or whether it may actually work has still not been
proven categorically.'
Indeed, scientists remain divided on
garlic's ability to combat colds and flu.
Last March, a major investigation by the
respected global research organization, the
Cochrane Database, found that
increasing your garlic intake during winter can cut the duration of
cold symptoms - from five-and-a-half days to four-and-a-half.
But the report, which amalgamated all previous scientific studies on
garlic, said it could not draw solid conclusions because there is a
lack of large-scale, authoritative research.
The problem is that
pharmaceutical companies are not
interested in running huge, expensive trials - as they would
with promising new drug compounds - because there is nothing in
garlic that they can patent, package and sell at a profit.
Modified Garlic Soup Recipe
Serves 4
-
26 garlic cloves (unpeeled)
-
2 tablespoons olive oil
-
2 tablespoons (1/4 stick)
organic butter (grass fed)
-
1/2 teaspoon cayenne powder
-
1/2 cup fresh ginger
-
2 1/4 cups sliced onions
-
1 1/2 teaspoons chopped fresh
thyme
-
26 garlic cloves, peeled
-
1/2 cup coconut milk
-
3 1/2 cups organic vegetable
broth
-
4 lemon wedges
Procedure
-
Preheat oven to 350°F.
-
Place 26 garlic cloves in small
glass baking dish.
-
Add 2 tablespoons olive oil and
sprinkle with sea salt and toss to coat.
-
Cover baking dish tightly with
foil and bake until garlic is golden brown and tender, about
45 minutes.
-
Cool.
-
Squeeze garlic between
fingertips to release cloves.
-
Transfer cloves to small bowl.
-
Melt butter in heavy large
saucepan over medium-high heat.
-
Add onions, thyme, ginger and
cayenne powder and cook until onions are translucent, about
6 minutes.
-
Add roasted garlic and 26 raw
garlic cloves and cook 3 minutes.
-
Add vegetable broth; cover and
simmer until garlic is very tender, about 20 minutes.
-
Working in batches, puree soup
in blender until smooth.
-
Return soup to saucepan; add
coconut milk and bring to simmer.
-
Season with sea salt and pepper
for flavor.
-
Squeeze juice of 1 lemon wedge
into each bowl and serve.
Can be prepared 1 day ahead.
Cover and refrigerate.
Rewarm over medium heat, stirring
occasionally.
If garlic were found to be a wonder drug, consumers could simply buy
it in the supermarket for 30p a bulb or grow their own in
the garden.
Nevertheless, garlic has a long and proud tradition as a medicine.
-
The Ancient Greeks advocated
garlic for everything from curing infections, and lung and
blood disorders to healing insect bites and even treating
leprosy.
-
The Romans fed it to soldiers
and sailors to improve their endurance.
-
Dioscorides, the personal
physician to Emperor Nero, wrote a five-volume treatise
extolling its virtues.
One of the most interesting of the
recent findings is that garlic increases the overall antioxidant
levels of the body.
Scientifically known as
Allium sativum, garlic has been
famous throughout history for its ability to fight off viruses and
bacteria.
Louis Pasteur noted in 1858 that
bacteria died when they were doused with garlic. From the Middle
Ages on, garlic has been used to treat wounds, being ground or
sliced and applied directly to wounds to inhibit the spread of
infection. The Russians refer to garlic as Russian penicillin.
More recently, researchers have unearthed evidence to show garlic
may help us to stay hale and hearty in a number of ways.
Last June, nutrition scientists at the University of Florida found
eating garlic can boost the number of T-cells in the bloodstream.
These play a vital role in strengthening our immune systems and
fighting viruses.
And pharmacologists at the University of California found that
allicin - the active ingredient in garlic that contributes to bad
breath - is an infection-killer. Allicin also makes our blood
vessels dilate, improving blood flow and helping to tackle
cardiovascular problems such as high cholesterol.
An Australian study of 80 patients published last week in the
European Journal of Clinical Nutrition reported that diets high in
garlic may reduce high blood pressure.
In 2007, dentists in Brazil found that gargling with garlic water
(made by steeping crushed garlic cloves in warm, but not boiling,
water) can kill the germs that cause tooth decay and gum disease.
But they hit a snag:
the volunteers refused to continue
the experiment, complaining that the garlic gargle made them
feel sick.
Looking at the garlic soup recipe
certainly made me feel queasy.
Still, it gave me an excuse to use up my
ample supply of garlic.
Though last year's awful weather caused crop failures on my
allotment, I enjoyed a bumper harvest of garlic.
Among its many other virtues, garlic kills slugs and snails.
Researchers from the University of Newcastle believe it contains
oils that may cripple the nervous systems of these slimy creatures.
There are two schools of thought as to the best way of preparing
garlic to make the most of its medicinal qualities.
Argentinean investigators found it releases its allicin-type
compounds when you bake the cloves, while scientists at South
Carolina Medical University believe peeling garlic and letting it
sit uncovered for 15 minutes produces the highest levels of
compounds to fight infection.
So you can simply peel half of the garlic cloves and roast the other
half with the kitchen door tightly closed (to stop the pong
permeating throughout the house).
After an hour-and-a-quarter's industrious soup-making, sprinkle
lemon juice over a bowl of steaming, grey gloop and tuck in.
The heady aroma certainly revs up the appetite and the first
spoonful does not disappoint. Delicious as it is, however, one large
bowl of home-made soup is a more than ample meal.
As for the soup's cold-preventing powers, only time will tell.
Regular bowlfuls may very well keep me free of winter ailments,
thanks to the virus-killing compounds they contain.
Or it could just be that my nuclear-strength garlic breath will keep
everyone who is infectious far out of sneezing range for months to
come.
Sources
Garlic Proven 100 Times More
Effective Than Antibiotics, Working In A Fraction of The Time
by April McCarthy
May 2, 2012
from
PreventDisease Website
A significant finding from Washington State University shows that
garlic is 100 times more effective than two popular antibiotics at
fighting disease causing bacteria commonly responsible for
food-borne illness.
Their work was published recently in the Journal of Antimicrobial
Chemotherapy a follow-up to the author's previous research in
Applied and Environmental Microbiology which conclusively
demonstrated that garlic concentrate was effective in inhibiting
the growth of
C. jejuni bacteria.
Garlic is probably nature's most potent food. It is one of the
reasons people who eat
the Mediterranean diet live such
long healthy lives.
Garlic is also a powerful performer in
the research lab.
"This work is very exciting to me
because it shows that this compound has the potential to reduce
disease-causing bacteria in the environment and in our food
supply," said Xiaonan Lu, a postdoctoral researcher and lead
author of the paper.
One of the most interesting of the
recent findings is that garlic increases the overall antioxidant
levels of the body.
Scientifically known as
Allium sativum, garlic has been
famous throughout history for its ability to fight off viruses and
bacteria. Louis Pasteur noted in 1858 that bacteria died when
they were doused with garlic.
From the Middle Ages on, garlic has been
used to treat wounds, being ground or sliced and applied directly to
wounds to inhibit the spread of infection.
The Russians refer to garlic as Russian
penicillin.
"This is the first step in
developing or thinking about new intervention strategies," said
Michael Konkel, a co-author who has been researching
Campylobacter jejuni for 25 years.
"Campylobacter is simply the most common bacterial cause of
food-borne illness in the United States and probably the world,"
Konkel said.
Some 2.4 million Americans are affected
every year, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention, with symptoms including diarrhea, cramping,
abdominal pain and fever.
The bacteria also are responsible for triggering nearly one-third of
the cases of a rare paralyzing disorder known as Guillain-Barre
syndrome.
Diallyl disulfide is an
organosulfur compound derived from garlic and a few other genus
Allium plants. It is produced during the decomposition of
allicin, which is released upon
crushing garlic
Lu and his colleagues looked at the ability of
diallyl sulfide to kill the
bacterium when it is protected by a slimy biofilm that makes it
1,000 times more resistant to antibiotics than the free floating
bacterial cell.
They found the compound can easily
penetrate the protective biofilm and kill bacterial cells by
combining with a sulfur-containing enzyme, subsequently changing the
enzyme's function and effectively shutting down cell metabolism.
The researchers found the diallyl sulfide was as effective as 100
times as much of the antibiotics erythromycin and ciprofloxacin and
often would work in a fraction of the time.
Two previous works published last year by Lu and WSU colleagues in
Applied and Environmental Microbiology and Analytical Chemistry
found diallyl sulfide and other organosulfur compounds effectively
kill important food-borne pathogens, such as Listeria monocytogenes
and Escherichia coli O157:H7.
"Diallyl sulfide may be useful in
reducing the levels of the Campylobacterin the environment and
to clean industrial food processing equipment, as the bacterium
is found in a biofilm in both settings," Konkel said.
"Diallyl sulfide could make many foods safer to eat," said
Barbara Rasco, a co-author on all three recent papers and Lu's
advisor for his doctorate in food science. "It can be used to
clean food preparation surfaces and as a preservative in
packaged foods like potato and pasta salads, coleslaw and deli
meats."
"This would not only extend shelf
life but it would also reduce the growth of potentially bad
bacteria," she said.
The natural substance could also be
derived without artificially introducing harmful chemicals to
disruptive its disease-reducing abilities.
Ironically, many researchers think that antibiotics may be just one
of several factors that contribute to intestinal blockage in young
children.
Chemists Explain The Health Benefits
Of Garlic
February 3, 2009
from
ScienceDaily Website
A Queen's-led team has discovered the reason why garlic is so good
for us.
Researchers have widely believed that the organic compound, allicin
- which gives garlic its aroma and flavor - acts as the world's most
powerful antioxidant.
But until now it hasn't been clear how
allicin
works, or how it stacks up compared to more common
antioxidants such as Vitamin E and coenzyme Q10, which stop the
damaging effects of radicals.
"We didn't understand how garlic
could contain such an efficient antioxidant, since it didn't
have a substantial amount of the types of compounds usually
responsible for high antioxidant activity in plants, such as the
flavanoids found in green tea or grapes," says Chemistry
professor Derek Pratt, who led the study.
"If allicin was indeed responsible
for this activity in garlic, we wanted to find out how it
worked."
The research team questioned the ability
of allicin to trap damaging radicals so effectively, and considered
the possibility that a decomposition product of allicin may instead
be responsible.
Garlic
Chemists have
discovered the reason
why garlic is so good
for us.
Through experiments with
synthetically-produced allicin, they found that an acid produced
when the compound decomposes rapidly reacts with radicals.
Their findings are published in the January 2009 issue of the
international chemistry journal Angewandte Chemie.
"Basically the allicin compound has
to decompose in order to generate a potent antioxidant,"
explains Dr. Pratt, who is Canada Research Chair in Free Radical
Chemistry.
"The reaction between the sulfenic
acid and radicals is as fast as it can get, limited only by the
time it takes for the two molecules to come into contact. No one
has ever seen compounds, natural or synthetic, react this
quickly as antioxidants."
The researcher is confident that a link
exists between the reactivity of the sulfenic acid and the medicinal
benefits of garlic.
"While garlic has been used as a
herbal medicine for centuries and there are many garlic
supplements on the market, until now there has been no
convincing explanation as to why garlic is beneficial," says Dr.
Pratt.
"I think we have taken the first
step in uncovering a fundamental chemical mechanism which may
explain garlic's medicinal benefits."
Along with onions, leeks and shallots,
garlic is a species in
the family Alliaceae.
All of these other plants contain a
compound that is very similar to allicin, but they do not have the
same medicinal properties. Dr. Pratt and his colleagues believe that
this is due to a slower rate of decomposition of the allicin analogs
in the onions, leaks and shallots, which leads to a lower level of
sulfenic acid available to react as antioxidants with radicals.
The study was funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering
Research Council of Canada (NSERC) and the Ontario Ministry
of Innovation.
Other members of the research team are
Queen's Chemistry post-doctoral researcher Vipraja Vaidya and
Keith Ingold, from the National Research Council of Canada.
|