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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 Egyptians recommended it for 22 ailments. In a papyrus dated 1500BC, the 'labourers who built'  the pyramids ate it to increase their stamina and keep them healthy.

  • 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.