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Garlic May Ward Off Heart Woes
It spurs a chemical linked to healthy blood vessels, study finds
By Ed Edelson
HealthDay Reporter
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TUESDAY, Oct. 16 (HealthDay News) -- Garlic lovers, take heart: The pungent root may promote healthier responses in blood vessels.
So say researchers who found that compounds in garlic cause tissues or blood vessels to release a chemical called hydrogen sulfide. In large quantities, this compound can be deadly, but it's also an essential molecule within the body, causing blood vessels to relax and reducing dangerous inflammation.
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But how you take your garlic matters, the research showed. "If you prepare it in certain ways, you can lose the compounds that cause it to release hydrogen sulfide, so that helps explain why there has been such great variability in studies," noted senior researcher David Kraus, an associate professor of environmental health sciences at the University of Alabama, Birmingham.
His team published its findings in this week's online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
In the array of garlic health studies, more than half have shown some positive effect, but that effect has tended to be small, and some trials have even shown negative health effects, Kraus noted. Some of his team's experiments used juice extracted from supermarket garlic. Human red blood cells exposed to tiny amounts of the juice began emitting hydrogen sulfide. Most hydrogen sulfide production took place at the membrane of the red blood cells, although a fraction was made within the cells.
When working with garlic, Kraus first crushes the clove. He then waits for the reaction that produces the compounds that trigger hydrogen sulfide release. "We usually let the garlic crush for 15 minutes," he said.
Other studies of garlic's health effects have failed, Kraus said, because they look for activity that is impossible -- a reduction in blood cholesterol levels, for example. One such trial was done by Christopher D. Gardner, a nutrition scientist and assistant professor at Stanford University's Prevention Research Center in California.
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Copyright © 2007 ScoutNews, LLC. All rights reserved.
Last updated 10/16/2007
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SOURCES: David Kraus, Ph.D., associate professor, environmental health sciences, University of Alabama, Birmingham; Christopher D. Gardner, Ph.D., assistant professor, Stanford Prevention Research Center, Palo Alto, Calif.; Eric Block, Ph.D., professor, chemistry, State University of New York, Albany; Oct. 15-19, 2007, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
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