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Friday, December 3, 2010

What's the Value of Garlic?

10 heavyweights for weight management #6
By Bill Sardi June 22, 2010

Garlic: A remarkable experiment shows a natural molecule may be able to single-handedly quell epidemic levels of obesity, high blood pressure and diabetes that now plague Western societies.

Researchers in Israel used allicin, an active ingredient in fresh-crushed garlic cloves, and compared it with enalapril, a drug often used to treat hypertension. Rats were fed a fructose-rich diet for five weeks. During the last two weeks, groups of 10 animals received only fructose, fructose + allicin or fructose + enalapril. After two weeks, allicin lowered blood pressure from the maximal level of 153.4 to 139.7 after two weeks on allicin and insulin was reduced from 11.7 to 6.92ng per milliliter, and triglycerides were cut from 132.8 to 59.6. More remarkably, the fructose-fed rats were massively obese while the fructose plus allicin-fed animals were normal weight.20

References

20. Doucet E, Tremblay A. Food intake, energy balance and body weight control. Eur J Clin Nutr 1997;51:846-55. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9426360

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