Why You Should Be Eating Garlic EVERY DAY!

garlic should you be eating one to two cloves of garlic every single day for your health you stink have you been trying this on your own you smell like you garlic body odor okay well too much what why that was good that was too much was too much keep it okay okay that was too much had to go too far okay here we go welcome to talking with docs I'm Dr Brad wey and I'm Dr Paul zel So today we're talk about garlic there's a lot of things in social media and on the internet about

garlic and but whether or not they can actually make a difference in your health so we did a bit of a dive to find out is there any evidence to show that hey people that eat more garlic have health benefits some people are going to ask can it affect my hormone levels like can it increase my testosterone yes or even your estrogen stick around to the end and we're going to answer that question for you all right okay so so what's garlic garlic is part of What's called the aliam genus or the family of food

it includes onions and shallots and chives and they all kind of do the same thing but garlic is really the Superstar of this family when it comes to health okay so are the chives and the shallot jealous I I think they are I would be based on the evidence but often when they're eaten together actually there's some potential um benefits when they synergistic benefits yeah you know onions and garlic who doesn't like onions and garlic together a lot of people okay so when you talk about garlic how can you consume garlic so there's like the

fresh and the raw garlic there's the cooked garlic and then there's like the garlic powder or the garlic supplement G bread garlic garlic so any of those things could lead to garlic bread right I would say though the evidence clearly shows that fresh garlic is the best yeah usually that's the way it is when you cook stuff you the heat denatures the proteins in it change the shape of those molecules and then you lose some of those effects yeah there are a couple plants where actually it helps we're not talking about that today but yes

ID say generally speaking you don't want to cook it when it comes to garlic if you're going to sauté it sauté it really lightly otherwise the benefits are are taken away the more you cook it um and so so how much garlic are we talking about we're talking about one to two cloves a day which is 600 to 1200 milligram if you're looking at a supplement or some other type of form but that's kind of the dose that most of the randomized control trials and there are a shocking number of Trials on garlic that are

going to make it feel better who funded all these trials I mean Garlic's off patent now it it is interesting so I guess maybe because the studies were the study itself still costs money though it's like the organization of most studies it's not actually the product that usually is the barrier farmers iation the garlic well maybe I I didn't look into how much money is driven by garlic but I suspect it's a fair bit and so what in garlic a garlic economy I think there probably are countries that maybe are garlic driven exports so the

two compounds that are really most um most dominant or most uh responsible for the health benefits are something called allisin and D alil sulfide so these are sulfur-based compounds what's really interesting about them particularly with fresh garlic so when you press your garlic When you crush it here's something that's going to be the one of your number one takeaways from today's video you need to wait about 10 or 15 minutes cuz the actual Act of crushing it or putting it through your garlic press activates an enzyme called alenas and what this does it breaks down

a compound called alenin out to down to a comic called alisin and allisin is the one that really does all the heavy lifting for the health must be what Elvis Costello was singing about in his song Allison but finally chopped so finally chopped same thing so that kind of crushing press anything that kind of it's a physical damage to the to the garlic that leads to this enzyme being more active so hold off don't just crush it and then eat it which probably no one's doing anyway probably not and if you're eating an entire clove

you're actually probably not getting all the potential benefits unless you chew it chew it and leave it in your mouth for 10 to 15 minutes and you know what the health benefits of garlic may not be useful because you will live a life alone will be alone and we've done studies before we've done talks that show being by yourself is actually bad for your health there you you got to stay connected so maybe monitor your garli a ying and yang of garlic okay so so we got just short of 10 things that garlic does as

far as your health me so let's start at the top what what do people mostly care about when it comes to health what do people want to reduce the risk of I think that well death yeah yes I think the for me the classic one is blood pressure because I remember when I was in grade eight we had a French teacher you don't I'm serious and so she would absolutely wreak of garlic french was a tough enough class to sit through at the best of times but when she came in exuding garlic odors in every

direction it was hard to pay attention focus and learn the conjugation of ofir or ET and she was taking garlic right because of hypertension and this was a long time ago so she's a smart lady because there actually have been good randomized control trials that have shown that taking garlic in that typical 1 to2 clove or 600 to 1200 milligram range can reduce your systolic pressure by somewhere in the range of 5 to 10 mm and your diastolic pressure in the 2 to 5 mm range so like a significant measure typically over a period of

8 to 12 weeks for to see the benefit but can really make a difference for your blood pressure and garlic is the reason I don't speak French so well yeah yes okay so similar to that staying on our heart health side so almost like Ernie and Bert really I'd say high blood pressure goes with high cholesterol someone's called us that before I I know okay cholesterol that one Rings close to home for me cuz as you know I am on a stat my cholesterol I'm not sure if it's the right to do if it's working

or not but and it makes a lot of people it's it's a Hot Topic as far as there's been some controversy about the role specifically of LDL and how much do we need to lower and all the rest of the stuff what we would say is that there are randomiz control trials that show garlic can reduce your total cholesterol in the range of 10 to 15% according to one randomized control trial and your LDL specifically about 10% and so that sort of in keeping with that plant-based diet that's going to help your cholesterol right right

so the way that they think think it happens is it not only reduces production in our liver which despite what people think is most of your cholesterol doesn't come from your food most of it is made by your liver because it is necessary so when people go on medication to lower their cholesterol the goal is not to get your cholesterol to zero because it would kill you it is a critical component of many functions in our body but it reduces the synthesis and also increases the breakdown of cholesterol molecules and absorption of bile so and

basically that's why there's such a genetic component to hyper cholesterolemia your lious yeah yeah okay so that's number one heart health good for your heart health a good way to look at it my liver is turned on yeah okay number two is that all number one blood pressure heart health is number one okay the other big thing that people are interested in these days is the antioxidant properties of various food how much have we talked about that we' talked a lot about antioxidant cleaning up those free radicals that can do damage to your cells right

so yeah so free radicals are unstable molecules that damage your cells and even can do damage to your DNA and this leads to things like inflammation and cancer and other chronic diseases like diabetes and heart disease so antioxidant molecules in garlic can help can help reduce this Okay so we've got hard Health we've got antioxidant a pretty good start yeah number we could end it here and it'd be good enough to eat we could i' would say I'd eat garlic after the first two number three I'd say is a very hot topic we should dedicate

an entire video just to this topic alone is it has anti-inflammatory properties so talk about like why does inflammation even matter what does it what does it look like it's it's your body is kind of angry mhm angry and there's a way that we measure this and it's through blood tests of things like C reactive protein Incan 6 and tumor necrosis Factor Alpha long confusing chemical names but there have been randomized control trials that show taking garlic reduces these very measurably now inflammation is part of the immune response and is absolutely necessary if you cut

yourself or you get an infection you need the inflammation that's the beginning of many responses however when that uh that inflammation process Balan that's tipped to the side of inflammation it's now becoming implicated in so many almost everything to be honest with you everyone's thinking it's sort of an inflammatory especially like plaques building in your arteries plaques breaking off coronary AR disease that is an inflammatory component to it so anti-inflammatories properties of garlic may be overlapping into the heart health as well and that probably is why we've known that aspirin like baby aspirin seems to

have so many rules now that we're telling everybody to take it but that's probably where some of its benefit obviously comes from that's a funny thing too the anti inflammator because it's a dose specific response too much anti-inflammatory will harm your heart will harm your kidneys will help your stomach so don't you know many nephrologists as we've learned on our show say don't take regular anti-inflammatories but that whole low dose of anti-inflammatory was used a lot I mean that was the first thing you give when you're someone's having a heart attack take two call me

in the morning if you can okay number four if you pull through number four is immune support So everybody's looking for a we it's it's no it's October in Canada we're heading into cold and flu season right so everyone's looking for a way how can I reduce the number of colds that I have or the duration or whatever and so what I would tell you is that there are good randomized control trials that show a bunch of things one reduced frequency of colds like reduced it by almost half in this one randomiz control trial reduce

duration of the cold 1.5 versus 5 days in another randomized control draw so significant for me if I'm sick all week versus Tuesday I'm already turning the corner I get through the week or I get to have a weekend at least right okay number two it showed reduced frequency duration and severity of upper respiratory tract infections which could fall into the category of a cold as well and then the last one is they actually did a scientific study to measure immune function so te- cell function as well as the number of something called natural killer

cells we're taking garlic increased both of these right do you think the cold frequency reduction as possibly cuz nobody is going near you cuz you stink I knew you were going to go there so they did not control for that very these people were not in isolation but obviously if you isolated yourself you probably would not get a cold that's the pandemic isn't it all over again it sure is okay what about vampires what's the mechanism there what do you mean garlic keeps vampires away yeah did you know that yeah maybe it's the bleeding could

be yeah was that our next one no no the next one is it has antimicrobial properties right so microbes are just bugs and that could be a bacteria a virus a fungus A Parasite and shocking to me when we did some research that that there have been randomized on all these things and it seems to have benefit to the point where they used it for yeast infections where they actually put it on candida and compared it to a medication called clotrimazol where it was comparable fungus there one where they put it on warts HPV induced

warts and 60% of the trial group actually got rid of their warts just by putting topical garlic on that's a virus yes so so it's been shown MRSA there's actually a study for patients that were in the ICU they gave them garlic supplements and those people had less MRSA than the people that did not have garlic MSA methylin resistance stapac coccus orius that's a bacteria that's become resistant to many of our antibiotics and makes us nervous right so any way that we can reduce the amount of medication you have to take for these things um

definitely worth considering not saying abort any treatments that you're doing right now but something to consider or as an adant often it was with the other one and and show it certainly had a synergistic effect okay number six digestion improving your digestion ironically too much garlic can upset your digestion yeah they say like bloating and you can have a bit of stomach pain I'm sure everybody's different some people out there leave a common if it's you just can't tolerate a high dose of garlic yeah but improving digestion is one of the toted benefits of garlic

yeah and it can it can improve the health of your microbiome and we talk a lot about the microbiome it's kind of this weird kind of like the cloud no one really gets it but but garlic is a Prebiotic so it's actually food just like fiber is for those healthy bacteria to create an environment that's good few which is why I often go to the honey garlic chicken wing yeah someone's going to say actually you know what I had a patient in two days ago that said hey tell ZZ I'm going to we start reaching

for the chicken wings after I'm like wow in moderation yeah yeah okay number seven is reducing cancer or cancer protective or cancer treating benefits so again these are randomized contr trials these are not though um designed in Long digal fashion where people are given garlic versus not garlic to see if they get cancer but more observational studies where they say hey these people are taking garlic or whatever and they seem to have less so there three specific cancers that they looked at so one was stomach cancer so stomach cancer is directly correlated to something called

hpylori which is a bacteria that lives in a lot of people's stoms that get ulcers and can lead to cancer so people that took garlic had lower incidents of hpylori that's number one number two was coloral cancer so they had people that had a history of adenomas or polyps on um colonoscopy they gave them garlic and it reduced the progression of these polyps so a lower chance of progressing to a Cancer and the last one was people with prostate cancer randomized trial showed that people that had prostate cancer and took garlic supplements had lower PSS

which does not directly mean your mortality or morvid going to be reduced but definitely that is a one way that they measure progression of prostate canc only way you monitor prostate cancer is with your PSA yeah okay so that gets us through cancer so it leads us to the hormone component that we were talking about before okay so is it going to increase your testosterone okay if you take garlic regularly so this is a really important one so there have been rat studies that shown that giving garlic to rats like imagine all these little rats

hey here's some that rat looks ripped that's right so what it did though made them smell probably they're like hey there rat must be where gym rat comes from maybe I don't think so that's why we always use rats I don't think so but what it did show is that a a hormone called luteinizing hormone that is involved in the pathway towards testosterone luteinizing hormone when up so it showed that that related to an increase in testosterone in rats however to dat there have been no randomized control trials in humans that have shown that taking

garlic will increase your testosterone and we've talked about this before the ways to increase your testosterone are like General Health measures so resistance training you know good sleep reducing your stress there are not really a lot of foods that can necessarily increase your testosterone and that is a sort of a great area that what is the right testosterone level it's such a massive range it's a wide range and I think everybody's different and I know there is Trend I'd say for more kind of middle-aged men to be taking testosterone yes I noticed that a lot

of my patients run yeah testosterone are you on testosterone no no you're you're Natty no yeah is that the way I say it yeah you're like natural oh yeah yeah yeah you're natural okay so the last one the other side of the hormone skill is estrogens yes yeah so there was one randomized to trial that show that showed in post-menopausal women people that took um garlic supplements or ate garlic had um less risk of osteoporosis and less progression of the loss of their bone density so won't necessarily grow your bone but we know that postmenopausal

women are at risk of osteoporosis because of increased bone loss and in all of us that whether or not we have bone loss or bone gain is really relating the turnover so we're always breaking down our bone and then building it back up it's that balance if we can reduce the loss typically it's going to help preserve our bone right and as we age we do suffer loss of bone and wom resistance training healthy diet those are the things to keep your bone mass but in addition now some evidence that garlic might help wom so

is there anyone that who should not eat garlic so I'd say generally speaking probably not but so what are the downsides to garlic we talking about elevator operators yeah so so it does cause potentially bad breath depending on how much glic you have mean brush your teeth alosis yeah um and then even if you have lots of garlic it actually ooze out of your pore so you can actually have like body odor like garlic body odor I think the kind of bad breath garlic kind and the brushing teeth isn't going to do it it's coming

out L but for me brush your lungs I don't think that's bad breath I think garlic breath is not bad breath I think you know what I mean cuz it's identifiable it's for me I don't like bad breath and I don't know what why does it smell like that if it's garlic I'm like I like garlic no I think a lot of people are going to disagree with you in the comments leave a comment about garlic breath if you like garlic breath okay so that's number one number two you mention it sometimes people that eat

garlic and it varies between individuals you can have some bloating or some stomach discomfort with eating Garlic and then the last one is um Studies have shown that it can actually measurably increase your bleeding time so if you are on an anticoagulant already if you are at risk of bleeding through some antiplatelet mechanism that they're not totally sure of so be a little bit careful especially if you're having upcoming surgery or something when someone says hey what medications are you taking your surgeons try to figure out if you're going to bleed mention things like garlic

and and that may be one of the mechanisms that helps your heart health too because a lot of cardiac treatments are aimed at reducing your clotting it's all tied in so the take message for me is consider taking some garlic it's Garlic's cheap it's readily accessible just crush it it tastes delicious put it on a salad raw ideally wait 10 or 15 minutes one or two cloves a day and you can see the many benefits of garlic and do we don't even have to say check with your healthcare provider before you eat garlic well if

you're bleeding I only for it's at a restaurant I know yes yes if you're going to eat a lot of it or really change your diet maybe talk to them but otherwise I would agree and if you like this video please like it subscribe to our Channel share it with someone that you think can benefit from it and please leave a comment let us know your thoughts on garlic remember you are in charge of your own health and your own garlic intake and thereby your own breath and body odor let's see next time