Skip to content
Discover more Dictionaries & Encyclopedias cooking food We’ve all been there: skipped eating that garlic knot during our first date, or chewed some mints right after having a heavy pasta meal. Garlic is famous for being extremely loud. It doesn’t really care about your social life and doesn’t give a damn about how your breath smells. However, once start looking look past the smell, and the outdated legends about repelling vampires, garlic is one of the most effective foods you can give your body.Fruits & Vegetables Here is the twist, however: if you really want to experience all the health effects, you have to consume it raw. To clarify, don’t get me wrong here, there’s probably nothing better than roasting an entire head of garlic to a soft, sweet, and buttery consistency. However, cooking completely transforms the chemical composition of it. As far as its health benefits go, cooking garlic essentially kills them off. Discover more Dry Pasta & Noodles Grains & Pasta pasta To understand why raw garlic is so powerful, you have to look at a sulfur-based compound called allicin.Language Resources Discover more Food cooked Food & Drink Here’s a fun piece of food science: allicin doesn’t actually exist inside an intact clove of garlic. It’s a defense mechanism. Garlic produces allicin the moment its cells get damaged. If you crush, slice, or chew a raw clove, two different compounds will mix up within the plant to form allicin. This process is causes the burning sensation you get when eating raw garlic, as well as the characteristic smell of it. As allicin is very sensitive to heat, then cooking, roasting, or even pickling garlic can completely destroy it. By the time your garlic has mellowed out in a hot pan, the allicin is mostly gone. Eating it raw ensures you’re actually getting the active compound at peak strength. What raw garlic actually does for your body Discover more Biological Sciences cooked food
No, you do not need to swallow entire cloves as capsules nor struggle eating handfuls. In a number of clinical studies, it has been proven that the same effects are produced by 1 to 2 raw cloves on daily basis. In case you really detest …
