Poll: Raw garlic is the most powerful antibiotic plus health food

Vovici Online Survey Software

The above poll was created with a 30 day trail subscription, so I don't know if it will still be useable after that 30 days. Anyway, here is some information I have gathered about garlic:

I attended a talk by a medical doctor who divided his talk into 3 sections - nutrition, colon cleansing and the third one I forgot. Anyway, my confidence in him was he stressed nutrition first, and said that if you get your nutrition right, the rest will follow. Plus he also started his presentation with the famous saying you see in this blog Header - "Let your food be your medicine and your medicine be your food" by Hippocrates. He also said the same thing as what I had wrote about in Landmark legislation on nutrition (click BACK button to get back to this post), that more and more medical schools are now teaching nutrition as a subject.

He also said raw garlic is the most powerful antibiotic as garlic do not spoil. He compared it to a banana which goes bad just after a few days. I myself have experience with raw garlic. I use a juice extractor to extract the juice from garlic, use the extracted juice plus the pulp plus other stuff like honey to marinate chicken for a long time before I use turbo broiler to roast the chicken. Even though I leave the marinated chicken for a long time, it never spoil. Plus the taste is delicious. You should try it one day.

I also have a post Crush your garlic before you cook it or eat it raw (click BACK button to get back to this post).

So I hope you go through all this information before you vote in the poll, or if you have already voted, you can edit your vote.

Crush your garlic before you cook it or eat it raw

When you crush garlic it releases an enzyme, alliinase, that catalyzes the formation of allicin, which then breaks down to form a variety of healthful organosulfur compounds. Cutting it may help but is not as effective as crushing it.

Crushing garlic releasing useful substance has been known for some time, but a study lead by Claudio Galmarini and colleagues at the Institute of Nutrition and Technology of Foods in Argentina suggests crushing garlic before cooking can reduce the loss of garlic's healthful properties. They found that even a few minutes of cooking reduces the levels of the chemical compounds but reduction is steepest in whole garlic and less pronounced in garlic that has been crushed before cooking.

They postulated that crushing garlic before cooking probably allow alliinase to work before cooking inactivates the enzyme. Their report notes allowing crushed garlic to stand for 10 minutes before cooking may further enhance formation of those compounds before heat inactivates alliinase.

Source: Science Technology News: Scientists offer garlic cooking tips

Update 1 March 2007: I eat chopped raw garlic occassionally with my meal. I have insturcted the maid to crush the garlic before chopping it up. I now noticed a world of difference. Previously, I have to chew very well to get the "stinging" taste of raw garlic. Now, I hardly have to.