The best supplement for overall health, Part 2

Last time I started talking about what one would want in an ideal supplement. So, enough teasing. Here is the answer to the question of what supplement has, in my opinion, the best overall effect on a person’s health:

Garlic.

But not just any garlic. The type of garlic I’m talking about has been specially treated to unleash the full effect and power of the plant. But before getting to that, let’s cover a little background:

Garlic is known basically all over the world as having a positive effect on health. Whether it’s your Italian grandmother putting it into the pasta, the Koreans adding it to pretty much everything, or people on the Indian subcontinent using it in Ayurvedic medicine, I honestly can’t think of a single culture that doesn’t know about it and think that it’s great. But there are a couple of problems associated with its use.

One is the smell. If you eat a lot of garlic, you’re going to reek of the stuff. It’ll come out on your breath, in your sweat…basically everywhere…and make you as unpopular with potential romantic partners as it will with vampires. Not really ideal, right?

The second is, from a health point of view, a more serious problem: getting enough of the stuff into your system to allow garlic to work its magic. The active ingredient in garlic is something called allicin. And when you eat garlic, and it passes through the liver, most of the allicin gets destroyed. Regular cooking also destroys allicin, so the only way to get enough of the stuff into your body to do you any good is to eat massive amounts of raw garlic…which brings us back to problem number one. Also, a lot of people find raw garlic to be irritating to the throat and stomach. Again, not exactly ideal.

But there is a better solution available. Some very smart people discovered that if you bind certain minerals to the garlic molecule, you can form a protective coating. This process is called chelation, and if you ingest chelated garlic in the form of a pill, the cooking process is bypassed and the allicin will be protected as it passes through your liver. This occurs because the chelating minerals will be stripped off and destroyed, leaving the allicin largely intact and able to deliver its health benefits at almost 100% strength.

Now, if small amounts of cooked garlic are good enough for cultures around the world to celebrate their health benefits, you would expect full-strength garlic to produce some pretty spectacular effects. And in fact this is exactly what happens. You won’t “feel it” in the sense of super-charging your body or anything, but it will jack up your immune system to the point that nothing short of full blown influenza will even make a dent. Minor sore throats and colds will become things of the past. Fevers will not occur. If you suffer from canker sores, they will vanish. (This is how I found the product, as I used to get canker sores quite frequently. No longer.) Basically, unless there’s something on the level of a Black Plague epidemic going around, you just stop getting sick.

I don’t know about you, but the downtime and loss of productivity that happens when you get sick is a cost I don’t even want to try to calculate. Forget about the aches and pains and discomfort associated with colds and flu, just the potential loss of income is enough to make me okay with paying quite a lot to stay out of the doctor’s office.

And yet, chelated garlic is cheap. For about fifty cents a day you can have a fantastically strong immune system, no matter how old you are. And on top of that it’s GMO-free, gluten-free, 100% natural, vegan…there’s really no reason not to take it. So I do.

If you look around the net, you can find a lot of different garlic supplements for sale. Frankly, most of them aren’t worth much. They either don’t deliver enough garlic to make taking the supplement worthwhile, or they cost too much, or they lack the all-important chelation that makes the stuff work. But there are a few good ones. The best I’ve found, for both quality of ingredients and manufacturing and low cost, is from Frontline Nutraceuticals. They sell chelated garlic in a supplement called Canker Samurai for less than $20 a bottle, and if you order more than one bottle you can get shipping and so on for free. The sales page is here if you want to take a look.