New research unlocking the benefits of garlic

Garlic-releasing gas fights disease, cancer: research

The World Today
Tuesday, 16 October , 2007

Reporter: Ashley Hal
ELEANOR HALL: The healing properties of garlic been extolled for centuries. Now, US researchers have identified why the pungent clove can be useful in treating everything from cardiovascular disease to cancer.

The biologists from the University of Alabama in Birmingham found that garlic causes red blood cells to release hydrogen sulfide, and that leads to the relaxation of blood vessels.

The research was led by Associate Professor David Kraus and he told Ashley Hall that hydrogen sulfide is better known as rotten egg gas.

DAVID KRAUS: Sometimes it's called sewer gas. It's got a number of different names like that because it is very potent to our olfactory system and it is very toxic. It is a naturally occurring toxic gas, and if we smell a lot of it, if we get a, you know, a large whiff of it, it can paralyse your olfactory system and you can succumb to it.

So it is lethal, under high concentration.

ASHLEY HALL: As you mentioned, garlic's been connected with treating everything from the common cold to cancers and cardiovascular conditions. Are you able to now say with confidence that garlic is an effective treatment for these things?

DAVID KRAUS: There's so many clinical trials conducted with garlic, and the majority of them show beneficial effects, from a wide variety of ailments, as you just described. But there are clinical trials that show no effect, or even sometimes negative effects perhaps, but not … it's not clear from some trials.

And what we think our research shows is that if the benefits of garlic are related to the release of H2S when it's in the body, then this would be a way to standardise the variety of garlic supplements that are used for clinical trials, to make sure that the patients are all getting the same amount of the compounds that will produce H2S in the body.

Now, there is other research going on with sulfide directly being used in various human pathology models that show that sulfide can protect from cardiovascular damage during a heart attack, it can alleviate various sorts of inflammation, it can reduce platelet aggregation that would cause a clot to form. So sulfide is known to do many of these things already.

So if we can show that garlic produces sulfide from these compounds, then it's a very small logical step to say that sulfide that's produced from garlic is providing these additional benefits.

ASHLEY HALL: How much garlic do you eat? Or do you take garlic supplements?

DAVID KRAUS: Um, I don't take supplements. We just eat raw garlic. And we have a little dinner club of the people that do the research here, and we have figured out all kinds of ways to increase the garlic content in the food we eat. And we can easily eat more than five or so cloves per day. That's not hard at all.

ASHLEY HALL: Five or so cloves a day. Give us an idea of how you incorporate that many cloves of garlic into your diet.

DAVID KRAUS: Okay, one of the things we've come up with is that we take a small tub of hummus, and you can take an entire bulb of garlic and chop it up and put it in there and then spread that on bread, you can put it on vegetable dips, or in vegetables, in vegetable dips, you can use it on pasta, you can use it in a number of different ways. And in one bulb of garlic there's probably 15 or 20 cloves present.

ELEANOR HALL: Tips from garlic researcher and biology professor David Kraus from the University of Alabama, speaking to Ashley Hall.

but people who eat a lot of garlic stink

how do you get round that?