Take Off All Your Cloves.

When it comes to medicinal herbs, wild garlic was the most searched online in 2020 with 556k of searches, up nearly 250% on the previous year. So, it seems there’s a fair few of you of who are loving the wild garlic. Your garlic doesn’t have to be wild though to have a whole load of benefits.

Garlic has a lot of history due to being one of the oldest cultivated plants in the world and is full of allicin and selenium. No idea what allicin is? Don’t worry, all you need to know is that this is what gives garlic most of its health benefits and that by crushing or chopping the garlic you are activating the magic. Garlic is particularly good at fighting infections and may help with Candida.

Garlic also has antioxidant nutrients (remember my last post that said how important these are for male fertility) and is thought to lower blood pressure and improve circulation. Guess what the ovaries and uterus need? Good blood circulation. You may have even been to a fertility clinic where they do the Doppler scan to check the blood flow to individual follicles (they hold the eggs) and to the ovaries.

Garlic is also a prebiotic which means it feeds the good guys in your gut and there’s plenty of research out there looking at the benefits to fertility of a healthy gut.

So, the takeaway is get garlic into your meals where you can. It’s such a versatile ingredient - blitz it into salad dressings and soups, make hummus with it, pesto, tomato sauce, roast your veggies with it…you get the idea.

But what about the garlic breath I hear you say, well apparently if you “chew some sprigs of parsley or mint” after eating then it lessens the odour. (Balch, 2010)

Cooking tip: In order to release the most allicin in the garlic, chop or crush your cloves first before preparing any dish and leave them to sit for 5-10mins before cooking.

References

Balch, P.A. (2010). Prescription for Nutritional Healing, Fifth Edition. New York: Avery.