While the conclusiveness of natural remedies is a constantly waged battle over whether they work or not, the fact is that if people feel better, it doesn’t matter. Thankfully, an increasing amount of research is pointing to the fact that they can actually work. While it will take some time for everyone on the planet to believe in the benefits of garlic, there are many that should be recognized.
Here are just five benefits to consider.
1. Fight Off Colds
One of the great ways that garlic helps to keep you healthy is by boosting your immune system. When you take garlic supplements, you’ll be much healthier than if you hadn’t. It turns out that you’re actually only half as likely to get sick when you take garlic as when you don’t.
Even cold symptoms can be lowered by a significant amount, keeping what could be a weeklong illness down to just a day or two. This ensures that you feel more comfortable and bounce back much sooner.
If you take a very high dose of garlic when you’re sick, you can lower the number of days you’re sick by half. While there isn’t a lot of sufficient evidence for an FDA certification of garlic as a treatment for sickness, there’s a long history of people using garlic while sick. Many homeopaths will chew on or suck a whole clove of garlic to reduce the severity of many illnesses like colds and flu.
2. Deal with Blood Pressure
When you have cardiovascular or blood pressure issues, you could look for all kinds of ways to deal with the symptoms. You could suffer a heart attack or a stroke, which are some of the biggest killers and exacerbated by cardiovascular problems. Hypertension is one of the most important elements of these diseases but garlic has shown to be an aid in the treatment of it.
In some studies, it’s been shown to reduce blood pressure as well as some of the popular medications people rely on for it. By taking a few hundred milligrams of garlic every day, you could lower blood pressure over the course of a few months.
Supplement doses need to be high if you want to have the impact you’re looking for. However, when you’re working on trying to solve such challenging issues, it’s worth the effort.
Comparing supplements with medication is both challenging and controversial but could lead to significant breakthroughs in the disease. If it’s your job that’s getting your blood pressure up, check out this interesting read to improve the way you work too.
3. Improve Your Cholesterol
When someone has high cholesterol, they’re going to suffer a much higher risk of heart disease, leading to a potential attack or a stroke.
Garlic has been shown to lower your total cholesterol and your LDL cholesterol.
When you have high cholesterol, you could drop it by 10% or more with garlic supplements. While HDL or “good” cholesterol isn’t impacted at all by garlic, that bad cholesterol, or LDL, is brought way down.
When you have high triglyceride levels, you need to get control over them. They’re a major risk factor when it comes to heart disease. However, garlic has shown no significant effects on triglyceride levels.
4. Deal with Dementia
When you have brain or memory issues, it’s a challenge to solve the problems that might just come with the aging process. WIthout the antioxidants you get from supplements, your body isn’t ready to fight off problems. Your brain will suffer oxidative damage from free radicals during the aging process.
Garlic has a lot of antioxidants that help your body protect against this kind of damage. When you take high doses of garlic, you can speed up your enzymes. When your antioxidant enzymes are promoted, they lessen a lot of the stress that happens in the body, especially when someone has high blood pressure.
If you combine the impact that garlic has on cholesterol and blood pressure, along with the Alzheimer’s and dementia, you get a powerful cocktail.
You can lower the risk of lots of common brain diseases very easily. Those antioxidants protect the brain against cell damage, which is one of the biggest factors that causes dementia.
5. Be a Better Athlete
If you’re trying to get the competitive edge in any sport, you want to be able to become better without breaking any rules. Since performance-enhancing substances are so taboo, you could avoid any issues and just stick with natural solutions. Garlic has long been a known performance enhancer without falling into trouble.
It was used by early cultures to keep people from falling asleep and to help laborers stay up and work for longer. If you look at the Olympic games in early Greece, there were people taking it then just to stay on top.
While there haven’t been a lot of human trials, there have been significant tests done with rodents. They show a better exercise performance when the rats are fed garlic than ones who aren’t.
If you take garlic oil for a few weeks, you could even lower your heart rate and improve your ability to exercise. While some people found no performance change at all, others have shown a decrease in that exercise-related fatigue.
Benefits may take time to become conclusive but this is a promising start.
The Benefits of Garlic Save Time and Money
When you first realize you’re getting sick, taking advantage of the benefits of garlic can ensure that you can seize the power of nature. It also means that you don’t have to hop in the car or leave the house to start feeling better. When you take advantage of natural remedies, you get to feel better faster.
If you’re interested in losing weight, check out our guide to avoid doing it the wrong way.
