Hundreds of years have passed and still garlic remains to be one of nature’s best medicines, if not the best. Garlic is extremely useful in treating a wide variety of ailments, including benign stomach bugs to something problematic such as impotence.

Recent studies show, however, that garlic deserves more respect than it is gaining right now. It can provide benefits for the heart and even help prevent cancer among its many amazing medical uses.

Garlic Components that Make It Super Powerful

There are two key compounds in garlic that is always worth mentioning:

  1. Amino acid that’s rich in sulfur known as alliin
  2. Enzyme that’s protein based known as allinase

You will notice that the clove has no smell, except when you crush or slice it. When this happens, those two compounds mix and they form allicin. This volatile compound, allicin, only lasts for a few hours. But it is totally worth it because it makes garlic a powerful antibiotic – so powerful that it is equivalent to 1/50th of penicillin’s power. Plus, allicin has antiviral and antifungal properties.

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Garlic is indeed an effective antibiotic / PicHelp

Is Garlic Really Better than Antibiotics?

One thing you can be sure of with garlic is that it doesn’t have negative side effects. It is all-natural and doesn’t have chemicals that can harm our health. There are actually several proofs that showed garlic is indeed an effective antibiotic:

  • One study evaluated the effect of the vegetable on Helicobacter Pylori, a type of bacteria that thrives in the digestive tract and can cause stomach cancer and gastric ulcer. Garlic stopped the growth of the bacteria and is now even used to treat about 20% of H. Pylori infections.
  • Another study showed that garlic may be able to increase survival rate of patients with sepsis, a fatal infection of the whole body. The vegetable does so by enhancing immunity.
  • There are strains that resist antibiotics, but some studies have shown that garlic can help as it will not produce resistant bacteria.

How to Use Garlic as an Antibiotic

Since garlic is generally safe, there is no particular dose to take. The University of Maryland Medical Center suggests that you consume two to four garlic cloves or 600 to 1,200mg of garlic extract (aged) every day. Note that you should only consume raw garlic because cooked garlic doesn’t have allicin as this compound disappears when exposed to heat.

You should also avoid taking garlic pills just to avoid the smell or the strong taste. The healing compound of the vegetable is found when you crush it, so you have to ingest it in raw form.