In Pursuit of Garlic (2 page)

Before too many millennia passed, garlic’s distinctive qualities, especially its intriguing taste, were discovered by the people of the Neolithic period. It stored well and so provided necessary food and energy for the winter. Humans began to domesticate it. Explorers and travelers—including Marco Polo—journeying along the Silk Road of Central Asia were introduced to garlic; they packed it in their caravans and took it with them as they moved around the ever-widening world—to North Africa, China, southern Asia, and the Mediterranean, where it was intensely cultivated and diversified and eventually, it is theorized, morphed into softneck garlic.

BUT GARLIC became famous among these cosmopolitan travelers as more than a food and a flavoring; it was also said to give men stamina and strength. It became prized for its reputed magical powers in repelling devils and dangerous stinging insects and in curing disease. Garlic became the trendy food of the age. The daughter of Mesopotamia’s King Su-Su’en loved garlic so much that she took a whole trunkful with her on a trip to the kingdom of Ansan at the end of the third millennium BC. It was a huge crop in Egypt as well.

But popularity may have cost garlic its sex life. Gradually, over thousands and thousands of years, its birds-and-bees method of procreating has nearly disappeared. Garlic was a desirable crop and farmers were smart: they knew they could harvest better bulbs the following summer if they planted the cloves of especially desirable plants—those with stronger disease resistance, larger cloves, better taste, and greater storage capability. These bulbs were often produced by plants with weaker scapes and flower production (since the energies of those plants went into the bulb, not the flower), and as the centuries passed and plants with flowers were deselected, or flower scapes were deliberately removed to allow the growth of larger bulbs, garlic largely lost the ability to flower and set seed. Some flowers appear in today’s hardneck garlic, but they’ve become impotent.

Poor garlic: no birds, no bees, no sex life.

But despite its centuries of evolution, our humble little friend is being reborn and is becoming the trendy food of the twenty-first century. It’s undergoing a renaissance in the kitchen, the garden, and the medical laboratory. It’s identified as one of the foods that provide that indefinable umami flavor, now widely accepted as the fifth taste, after sweet, salty, bitter, and sour. A high-priced fermented garlic with a pristine exterior and sweet, chewy black cloves has made its way into the best gourmet food shops, to be used on pastas, in salsas, with seafood—any way you can dream up. In the garden, growers are trying out dozens of new garlic varieties in varying shades and stripes of purple, red, white, and brown. There’s even a pink one. The new cultivars don’t taste like “just garlic” either—nuances abound from hot to mild, nutty to sort of sweet, though it’s hard to describe garlic as sweet, because its strong essential flavor is always present. In late summer garlic lovers flock to fairs all over the continent offering the new varieties for sale, as well as lectures on raising and storing garlic and talks on its value for health.

There’s a simple, though offbeat, explanation for all this interest: the falling of the Berlin Wall. “When it came down in ’89, scientists were allowed into Russia and brought back literally hundreds of unnamed garlic varieties to North America for study,” says Paul Pospisil, who owns Beaver Pond Estates in Maberly, Ontario, and is the largest trial grower of organic garlic in Canada, evaluating strains from all garlic groups for their performance on many levels before they’re selected for further propagation. He’s also the editor of the
Garlic News,
a publication much loved by garlic aficionados. “A large number of these Russian varieties have become the basis of the many new cultivars we see now,” Pospisil continues.

Scientists’ interest goes far beyond developing new garlic varieties, however, and their experimental work is bringing new respect to garlic’s medicinal qualities. “Every university I know of is doing some kind of research into garlic,” says Pospisil. “They’re looking into its history and studying its taxonomy, of course, but most of all they’re interested in its medicinal aspects.”

With its selenium, germanium, allicin too
It can fight all kinds of disease
So if you’ve got arthritis,
TB
, or the flu
Just say, “Peel me a garlic clove please!”

RUTHIE GORTON,
“The Garlic Song,”
from the documentary
Garlic Is as Good as Ten Mothers,
by LES BLANK

FOR AS long as people have been writing things down, garlic has been considered a healer of a long list of ailments, even as its culinary popularity waxed and waned. In 3000 BC the Babylonians used it to treat many ailments, including intestinal worms; so did the ancient Chinese—the
Chiu Huang Pen-ts’ao,
an important book of medicine from the Ming Dynasty, recommends garlic as a treatment for parasites, ringworm, and dysentery; a poultice for infections; an insect repellent; an expectorant; and a diuretic. In Ayurvedic medicine, Hindus considered garlic a general tonic and a digestive, and crushed and sweetened it with honey to relieve coughs and mucus, fevers, swellings, and worms. Sanskrit texts describe garlic as a remedy for skin and abdominal diseases, rheumatism, and hemorrhoids.

GARLIC WAS a wonder drug in ancient Rome and Greece, the kind of snake oil that charlatans might have peddled at carnivals in the early 1900s, recommended for baldness, cancer, and pale skin. Dioscorides, a discriminating Greek physician who served the Roman emperor Nero, warned that although garlic expelled flatulence, it could disturb the belly and cause thirst or boils on the skin if applied too heavily. But Dioscorides wasn’t completely negative. He considered garlic valuable for many ailments. “It draws away the urine,” he wrote in
De Materia Medica,
his five-volume study of the properties and preparation of contemporary drugs. He highly recommended garlic as an antidote for many poisons, to treat intestinal parasites, to protect against diarrhea caused by “injurious waters,” to kill lice and nits, and to treat toothaches.

Perhaps more prophetically, given today’s continuing research into the use of garlic to lower blood pressure and get rid of serum cholesterol, Dioscorides said garlic cleaned out the arteries and “opened the mouths of veins.”

Or was it Pliny who said that? It’s hard to know for sure, for both recommended garlic for similar ailments, and they were contemporaries. (Pliny died in AD 79, Dioscorides in AD 90.) Pliny’s book was quoted for centuries, and Dioscorides’s
De Materia Medica
became the main pharmacological work in Europe and the Middle East until the 1600s.

Garlic continued as a popular remedy for whatever ailed you during medieval times and the Renaissance. But by the twentieth century its good reputation had plummeted, despite the work of Louis Pasteur, who in the nineteenth century had recognized the antibacterial effect of garlic juice. Albert Schweitzer used garlic to treat amoebic dysentery in Africa in the early 1900s, but remedies based on superstition and old wives’ tales were losing favor. By the 1930s, some of the new wonder drugs were already being prescribed.

Garlic was considered important when there was nothing else around, however. Medical staff on the front lines in the First World War made poultices out of garlic to treat wounds, and it was used in the Second World War when the new sulfa drugs and penicillin were unavailable. And garlic was used extensively to treat tuberculosis in the first quarter of the twentieth century. It’s easy to dismiss garlic as a folk remedy that’s been more efficiently replaced by modern drugs, but here’s something to consider: our ancestors came to similar conclusions about garlic’s medicinal properties while living continents apart and without print or electronic media to instantly broadcast their findings to the world. Afflictions like worms and intestinal parasites, diarrhea and other gastrointestinal disorders, coughs, bronchitis and pneumonia, skin lesions, hemorrhoids, infections of the ears and teeth—all were treated with garlic in some form.

GARLIC CONTAINS a wealth of sulfur compounds, which are well-known antibacterial agents, but allicin, an oxygenated sulfur, is the central compound most closely associated with garlic’s therapeutic benefits today. (Allicin is also what gives garlic its pungent taste.) Curiously, allicin doesn’t exist in an uncut clove but is born almost instantly when garlic is crushed or cut and two of its elements, alliinase and alliin, are released and rush headlong into each other’s arms. All cooks are aware of this chemical reaction when they chop or crush garlic because they can smell it, even if they don’t know the reason behind it. But this reaction wasn’t understood until 1944, when Chester Cavallito, a researcher at a chemical company in New York City, isolated the compound and named it allicin. He, too, found that allicin had significant antibacterial activity, in some cases almost as effective as penicillin’s.

In the decades since Cavallito’s findings, research into the medicinal value of garlic has stepped up, even though the garlic remedies we can buy are still homeopathic preparations and health supplements whose content and quality are largely unregulated—in North America, at any rate. But today garlic is being studied for its lowering of blood pressure and serum cholesterol (clearing the mouths of veins!), antifungal activity and antibacterial qualities, lowering of blood sugars, and anticancer effects, as well as for its value as a pesticide.

Resistance to antibiotics is growing, and garlic could become a welcome alternative. In his richly informative book,
Garlic and Other Alliums,
State University of New York at Albany chemist Eric Block describes petri-dish tests comparing the effects of dilutions of fresh garlic and the antibiotic ampicillin on an E. coli bacterium. Garlic may not have performed quite as well as the antibiotic, but it definitely inhibited the bacterium’s growth. In another test, a garlic solution caused E. coli bacteria to lose their shape, cluster together, and leak some of their contents. In experiments with strains of yeast such as candida, garlic was more effective than the fungal agent nystatin.

There’s much more in Block’s book—and many others—to persuade you to eat more garlic. The oral bacterium
Porphyromonas gingivalis,
which causes gum infections and has been associated with inflammation around the heart and rheumatoid arthritis, is sensitive to garlic. In a five-week trial, thirty people using a mouthwash containing 2.5 percent garlic showed reduced bacteria counts, and—probably much to the dismay of their nearest and dearest, although the test results didn’t specify whether the scent of the mouthwash lived beyond the trial—the effect lasted for a couple of weeks after they’d stopped using the rinse. Clinical studies in the past decade also show that garlic packs a punch against
Helicobacter pylori,
which causes chronic gastritis and duodenal and gastric ulcers.

AS FOR its antiparasitic activity, crushed garlic mixed with alcohol has been used for centuries to treat amoebic dysentery, as Dr. Schweitzer knew, as well as giardiasis, malaria, sandfly fever, and sleeping sickness. And the common treatment today for African eye worm, which afflicts millions in Cameroon and elsewhere in West Africa and is caused by the nematode
Loa loa,
is a mixture of onion and garlic juice dripped into the eye. In the past twenty years, garlic compounds have also shown some success in vitro against common viruses such as the herpes strain. The solution had to be so strong, however, that if it were used on living flesh it would damage the healthy cells around the treatment area.

Many contemporary reports claim that garlic in some form—even consumed as part of a daily diet—prevents or inhibits the growth of malignant tumors. A 2009 in-vitro study tested extracts of various vegetables on cells from pancreatic, lung, stomach, kidney, prostrate, breast, and brain cancers, and garlic came out on top as the strongest inhibitor of cancer cell production. Results may be different in real life, however. But an epidemiological study of people in China compared the incidence of stomach cancer in two communities, one where average consumption of garlic was 0.7 ounces (20 grams) a day, and a second in which people ate less than 0.04 ounces (1 gram) a day (assuming an average clove weighs 2.5 grams, that’s eight cloves and about half a clove, respectively). The incidence of cancer in the first group, which ate the larger amount of garlic, was 8 percent of the rate in the other group.

Tabloids helped make garlic the top-selling single-herb supplement in 2006, [but] since their pages also feature Elvis sightings and
UFO
bases on Mount Everest, the legitimacy of their reporting is suspect.

ERIC BLOCK,
Garlic and Other Alliums

THERE ARE many conflicting opinions about garlic and cancer, but enough evidence of its ability to inhibit cell growth exists that studies are taking place to determine how and why it might be effective against malignancies. Does it alter the metabolism of carcinogenic cells in some way? Does it somehow suppress their growth? Or does it simply improve the efficacy of other drugs? Or does it do any of these things?

As for cardiovascular disease, it seems the jury will be out for some time. Despite Dioscorides’s and Pliny’s conclusions that garlic opens the mouths of veins, most recent studies don’t support the claims—most made by the manufacturers of garlic supplements—that garlic reduces cholesterol. A Stanford University clinical trial that compared the use of fresh garlic with the use of garlic capsules and powdered garlic in 192 adults showed... nothing. An Asian review of adults treated with garlic for moderately elevated LDL cholesterol concluded: “Garlic... shows no beneficial effect on serum cholesterol.”

But does garlic reduce blood clotting, known in scientific circles as platelet reduction? Popular literature advises people about to undergo surgery to avoid garlic because it might thin the blood. In-vitro studies say that’s possible, but most clinical trials suggest otherwise.