This pungent vegetable is packed with bio-active compounds that may benefit your heart and immune health.
Many of us love garlic.
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Health Benefits of Regularly Eating Garlic
Garlic has many health benefits.
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Here are a few evidence-backed ones you may experience when you regularly eat garlic.
Immune System Support
Chronic inflammationcan harm your immunity by reducing your white blood cell count.
This is largely thanks to allicin, a sulfur-containing compound in allium foods like onions, chives and garlic.
The researchers believe garlic helps prevent viruses from entering and replicating in our cells.
For this reason, many people turn to more natural remediesand garlic is one of them.
A 2023 review inChinese Medicinealso supports garlic as helping to lower fasting blood glucose.
But even bacteria need to eat, and that’s where garlic comes in.
Garlic is a prebioticfood for your healthy gut bacteria.
Evidence suggests that garlic may play a role in helping your gut microbiome thrive.
A 2024 study inMicroorganismsintroduced garlic to human feces in the lab (sounds gross but stick with me).
The stool samples that had garlic added to them had more microbial diversity compared to the samples without garlic.
Unfortunately, garlic isnt friendly to everyones gastrointestinal system.
Other Potential Benefits
Garlic is also asource of antioxidants, which reduce inflammation in the body.
And a 2024 review inFrontiers in Immunologysuggests that garlic’s bioactive compoundsincluding antioxidantsmay be responsible for its health benefits.
These benefits include protection against cancer, diabetes, inflammation, heart disease, and infections.
Garlic Nutrition
Garlic not only adds flavor to dishes, it also adds nutrition.
How to Incorporate Garlic into Your Diet
Garlic is a kitchen staple.
Not only does it add a whole lot of flavor, but it also adds a little nutrition.
Because of this, it can be difficult to know if study results apply to using garlic in cooking.
Adding more garlic to your diet doesnt hurt and may even provide health benefits.
Since garlic has antihypertensive, antidiabetic and cholesterol-lowering effects, you might lower these parameters too much.
For the average person, garlic does not detox your body.
Your liver and kidneys do so regardless of whether or not you eat garlic.
Some people claim that garlics anti-inflammatory properties burn belly fat, but this isnt true.
Eating garlic hasnt been shown to result in long-term sustained weight loss.
The more garlic is processed and cooked, the lower the allicin content gets.
