At one of my favorite Italian restaurant recently I ordered a delightful appetizer known among my circle of friends as garlic balls. These dough balls are baked and known in an olive oil bath with chopped garlic, oregano and other various spices topped with none other than Italy’s favorite cheese, Parmesan.Instead of feeling incredibly full after carb-loading my lunch, I actually felt good. After checking my breath and popping a mint or two, I got to thinking about why exactly garlic is so popular and what health benefits it touts besides the delicious flavor it imparts on many a great dish.
Aside from warding off vampires, garlic has long been a friend to medicine. Hailed as a wonder drug, garlic has been trusted for centuries as a remedy for everything from nose sniffle to the plaque.
Garlic is used modernly in phytotherapy an alternative medicine in which natural extracts are used to promote health and wellness and has also been used topically to treat acne and as a mosquito repellent.
The stronger garlic, the more sulphur it contains, it was long thought that sulphur was the key to the medicinal power of the garlic. It turns out that researchers have found that an acid is responsible for the flavor and garlic’s healing properties.
An organic compound called allicin could be the antioxidant in charge. A recent study was done trying to figure out the way allicin works inside the body. Lead researcher of the study, a chemistry professor from Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, Derek Pratt explain the reason behind the research, if allicin was indeed responsible for this activity in garlic, we wanted to find out how it worked.
We didn’t understand how garlic could contain such an efficient antioxidant, since it didn’t have a substantial amount of the types of compounds usually responsible for high antioxidant activity in plants, such as the flavonoids found in green tea or grapes.
Pratt’s team found that the allicin compound decomposes to become the antioxidant in garlic.
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