Category: Nutrition

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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.

In Part 1 of this post, I promised you some references to back up all the claims I’ve made. Here they are:

LIST OF REFERENCES
Antimicrobial properties of allicin: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10594976

Allicin, the major ingredient of freshly crushed garlic, inhibits cancer: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11525603

and

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21269249

Allicin controls copper: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16972197

Activation of Nrf2: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23605179

Garlic is effective against multiple drug-resistant pathogens: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23569978

Most garlic supplements don’t deliver allicin in the advertised amounts: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11368641

Fungicidal properties of allicin: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16972197

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The best supplement for overall health, Part 1

One of the new topics I’d like to talk about here on this blog is maintaining overall health, not just health as it pertains to tendons. I’m in my mid-50s now, still in the gym, still about as strong as I’ve ever been, and aside from a finasteride tablet that I take once a day to stave off prostate cancer (it runs in my family), I take no medications whatsoever. Basically, I’m in pretty good shape. (If you want to see a picture taken at age 52, check out this post.)

I do, however, take a few supplements. Notice that I said “a few”… I’m not a guy who thinks that taking a shovel full of pills every morning is the way to go. 98% of your nutrition needs should come from eating good food on a consistent basis. But there are some areas where a few supplements can have a very beneficial effect. I want to talk about the one that I think is the absolute best in this next couple of posts.

I have to warn you, though: I’m going to get a little sciency here. If you’ve read about or purchased my tendon pain product, you know that I like to have a firm scientific grounding for any product that I recommend, and this one won’t be any different. So I’m going to get into the weeds a little bit, and while I’ll try to simplify things as much as possible, I’ll also list a bunch of primary research sources (in Part 2) for those who want to do a little further investigation for themselves.

But I promise you, it will be worth it. This supplement can really have a noticeable, long-lasting positive impact on your health. So let’s get to it.

If you wanted to design a supplement that would have the greatest impact on general health, what effects would you be looking for? Well, the first one would obviously be preventing sickness. If you’re sick, you’re not healthy, right? Aside from inherited genetic disorders, most sicknesses are caused either by viruses or bacteria. So you would want your supplement to protect against both.

A second desirable feature of our dream supplement would be to increase “healthspan”, which is the number of years that you live in a healthy and fully functional way. And a third might be extending overall lifespan (assuming that healthspan is taken care of). I don’t know of anyone who would turn down extra years on their lives, assuming that those years were healthy, productive ones.

So is there a supplement that does all of the above? Amazingly, there is. Not only does it exhibit a strong anti-viral and antibacterial effect, it activates Nrf2 (it stands for “Nuclear factor (erythroid-derived 2)-like 2”), which is an age-reversing gene.

In fact, Nrf2 is probably the single most important age-reversing gene. When activated, it starts a whole bunch of anti-oxidant activity in your body, and more anti-oxidants floating around means that you don’t accumulate as much “rust” as you get older. Calorie restriction, which a lot of people have probably heard about, activates Nrf2. (And in fact most of the benefits of eating less come from Nrf2 activation.) Rapamycin and resveratrol, both touted as anti-aging substances, activate Nrf2. Basically, at this point, the Nrf2 pathway looks like it holds the key to any sort of successful anti-aging supplement strategy.

(If you want more detail about Nrf2 you can read the Wikipedia entry here.)

Not only does this miracle supplement help kill viruses, not only does it help kill harmful bacteria, and not only does it activate a very important anti-aging mechanism, it also:

  • kills cancer cells
  • helps to control the accumulation of copper in the body (too much in the way of minerals in the body is another culprit in aging)
  • is anti-fungal, and
  • helps lower cholesterol.

Pretty good, huh?

So what is this miracle substance? Don’t worry, in Part 2 I’m going to tell you (and I’ll give good references for all of the claims I’ve made above). Stay tuned…