[00:00] If your grandma gave you garlic when you were sick, she wasn't completely crazy. Garlic contains a fascinating compound called allicin. But there's a trick to making it more effective. Because an intact garlic clove alone doesn't contain that much allicin.
[00:13] When you crush or chop the garlic, an enzyme in garlic, alinase, converts allin into allicin, the compound responsible for much of garlic's health benefits. But here's where many people mess it up. Alinase is heat sensitive.
[00:26] One experiment found that microwaving garlic for just 30 seconds reduced alanase activity by about 90%. So immediately exposing freshly cut garlic to intense heat can interfere with the reactions that generate garlic's health benefits. However, you can prevent that. When the researchers crushed
[00:42] the garlic first and let it sit for 10 minutes before heating it up, most of the biological activity was preserved. So the idea is quite simple. Before you heat up garlic, you need to crush it and let it sit for about 10 minutes. But what about your grandma? Was she right giving you
[00:55] garlic when you were sick. In one randomized trial, 146 people took either an allicin-containing garlic supplement or placebo every day for 12 weeks. The garlic group recorded just 24 cold episodes compared to 65 in the placebo group. And a Cochrane review found that garlic looks
[01:11] promising for preventing colds, although there still isn't enough clinical evidence to say that it definitely works. A randomized trial of 120 healthy adults found that aged garlic extract improved certain immune cell responses
[01:23] and was associated with less severe cold and flu symptoms, although it didn't significantly reduce how often people got sick. So garlic does have benefits for the immune system and the cold, but remember that you need to crush it or chop it,
[01:36] let it sit for 10 minutes before you heat it up. You could also eat it raw, but you still need to wait 10 minutes before you eat it. Now garlic can have some health benefits, but no single food is going to make you healthy or optimize your immune system.
[01:48] What matters more is your overall health, your fitness and lifestyle. If you want to see how your health stacks up, take my 3-minute health percent assessment that gives you your health percentile and shows you what you should improve first. Click the link below to start now.