Garlic! Upon our recent discovery that my husband may have high cholesterol levels, I have been doing research on how to solve the problem. I came across the valuable addition of garlic into our diet for lowering cholesterol. A month previous to this I had purchased a garlic press, and now I am going to use it significantly more.
A diet rich in garlic can have significant health benefits, according to the New York Times. It seems that garlic increases the production of hydrogen sulfide in your blood, which—in the short term—relaxes your blood vessels and increases blood flow. In the long term:
The power to boost hydrogen sulfide production may help explain why a garlic-rich diet appears to protect against various cancers, including breast, prostate, and colon cancer, say the study authors. Higher hydrogen sulfide might also protect the heart, according to other experts.
The downside (if you can call it that)? Benefits from garlic consumption in studies required an equivalent of two medium-sized cloves of garlic per day, and while some countries—namley Italy, Korea, and China—average as high as eight to twelve cloves a day—it may be a lot of garlic by your standards.
Another tip:
To maximize the health benefits, you should crush the garlic at room temperature and allow it to sit for about 15 minutes. That triggers an enzyme reaction that boosts the healthy compounds in garlic.
One person commented the following:
Garlic is extremely easy to grow. It does reasonably well even in Oregon’s mixed weather. Just stick some individual cloves in the ground anywhere on your property this fall and dig them up next summer when their foliage has turned mostly brown.
Read the whole article here.
Hi, you might want to check out a web site by dietician Karen Hurd. She has been curing people of things that the doctors say are not curable, all using diet, supplements, and beans. (she is also known as the “bean lady”.) She has a “health topics” section where she explains the connection between lowering cholesterol and eating beans. I don’t know if your husband ended up to have high cholesterol or not, but I think the site is worth reading for anyone, as she addresses a lot of health concerns. I have benefited from her site.