Alexis Unlimited

Hello World!  Do you eat garlic and onions? Did you know they are good for you? I eat garlic daily as I know how beneficial it is to my body. Onions don’t agree with me anymore so I don’t eat them.

Cooking with Garlic and Onions for your Best Blood Benefits

As we age, our arteries stiffen. “As your aorta stiffens it leads to a range of linked pathphysiological changes,” such as exposing your brain and your kidneys to greater pressure fluctuations, which may increase your risk of stroke and impairment of your kidney function.

However, when we consume garlic,

less than a quarter teaspoon of garlic powder a day—appear to have less

stiffness in their aortas. We think this is because garlic seems to improve your function of the inner lining of your arteries, which helps your arteries relax. But the protective mechanisms of garlic against your cardiovascular diseases are multiple, and include a combination of anti-clotting, clot-busting, antioxidant, and blood pressure- and cholesterol-lowering effects as well.

The latest review suggests that long-term garlic intake may your drop bad cholesterol levels about 10%, but your blood-thinning effects are such that the American Society of Anesthesiology recommends garlic intake be stopped a week before elective surgery. I eat raw garlic daily and it seems to keep me from getting sick, but I also bruise much easier from eating garlic. 

Or, you could just cook it to death. Unlike your anticlotting components concentrated in the yellow fluid around tomato seeds, which are heat stable, the antiplatelet activity in garlic and onions is lost with cooking. When comparing the platelet inhibition of raw garlic and boiled garlic, which is similar to the platelet inhibition of raw onion, garlic appears about 13 times more potent than onion, and eating garlic raw appears to be better than cooked.

This suggests that

“garlic and onion could be more potent inhibitors of blood [clotting] if you

consume it raw rather than in cooked or boiled.” So, it might be good for you to cook garlic right before surgery, but what about the rest of the time when you’re trying to suppress platelet over-activity to decrease your risk of heart attacks and stroke? “As garlic and onion are normally consumed in cooked food, their efficacy as preventive herbs in cardiovascular disease may be doubtful.” But, we can put some raw onion on salads and raw garlic in salsa, dressings, dips, or pesto.

Or, we can crush or chop it,

wait ten minutes, and then cook it. Researchers demonstrated the platelet-

inhibiting power of raw garlic. If you cook it for just a few minutes, it does fine; but after cooking for about five minutes, your benefit is gone.

If, however, you pre-crush the garlic and wait, some of the antiplatelet activity is retained a bit longer. That’s because the enzyme that makes the antiplatelet compounds is activated by crushing but destroyed by heat faster than it creates the compounds. So, by crushing first and letting the enzyme work its magic before cooking, one can delay the loss of function.

Even better,

though, is that, just like we can add broccoli enzymes in the form of raw radish or mustard powder to boost the benefits of broccoli, the addition of a little raw garlic juice to cooked garlic can restore the “full complement of antiplatelet activity that was completely lost without the [raw] garlic addition.”

When onions are cooked,

the antiplatelet activity is similarly lost within ten minutes, but then something strange happens. After 20 or 30 minutes of cooking, the effect on platelets is reversed and appears to make matters worse. Significant pro-platelet activation effects are seen, “suggesting that extensively cooked onions may stimulate rather than inhibit” platelets. That was in a test tube, though. Thankfully, when tested in people, even when onions are dropped in boiling water, fried for 10 minutes, and then left to simmer for 30 minutes, platelet activation drops within one to three hours after eating onion soup.

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I find this to be very interesting information as I eat a clove of raw garlic daily (and I have for a very long time now), but I can no longer eat onions as they don’t seem to like me anymore. 🙂

Have a great healthy day!