Healthy Immune Systems and Raw Crushed Garlic

Use Crushed Raw Garlic to Support a Healthy Immune System

In my home we do a lot of cooking and most every dish includes fresh crushed garlic and olive oil. There are countless studies suggesting the increased health benefits of including both of these ingredients in your home cooked meals, and more specifically garlic is known to support a healthy immune system.

You would expect to reap these benefits by including crushed garlic in your home cooking but Mary, over at Branches of Health informs us that our cooking techniques are likely diminishing the benefits we could be experiencing when we use garlic in our recipes.

Raw Garlic Benefits:

"When garlic is chopped or crushed, this action produces two sulfides, allicin sulfides and diallyl sulfides. These sulfides are what produce all the health benefits of garlic [a healthy immune system]. Roasted garlic has no medicinal value because it is whole and it has been cooked to a high temperature. Diallyl sulfides will survive cooking, but its medicinal value is not as high as the allicin sulfides. Cooking chopped garlic will degrade the allicin, and microwaving it will destroy it all together.

To get the best health benefits from garlic,chop the garlic or press it into some olive oil and leave it for about 15 minutes. Add it to the meal at the very end of cooking, or even to the plate once its been served. The smaller the pieces of garlic, the more sulfides produced and the more medicinal value it will have. Also, organic garlic bulbs will have a stronger taste, which means more sulfur content resulting in more medicinal value."

Cooking With Raw Garlic

This information is big news to me as my wife and I always crush and mince our garlic and then sauté it with whatever our meal calls for. Considering this information I might hold off on adding the crushed garlic to the pan and instead use it as a raw garnish when plating.

You can read more about the health benefits of Garlic over on Mary’s blog and more about supporting a healthy immune system here on How To Live Longer in my post on increasing T-Cell Count with mushrooms.