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Dear Friends,
Do all people have the right of access to the best healthcare? Do all people have the right to obtain healthy food? Do we consider these issues important enough to become personally involved in movements aimed at achieving quality healthcare and nutritious food for all?
In thinking back on the reason many of us chose the holistic health profession as a career path, wasn’t it to get people well—to alleviate suffering? I admire you in your choice of this profession and I know how increasingly difficult it is for health practitioners to move people from chronic dis-ease into the experience of wellness. There are many converging factors in the world today that are causing our species to become increasingly ill.
At BioImmersion Inc., we have chosen to focus on using food therapeutically, chosen to focus on getting our food system corrected, and chosen to focus on the issues of social justice because these form the medium or milieu within which health can be achieved, or not. In this week’s newsletter we will look again at garlic as a therapeutic food, and look again at the issue of social justice, which you will find in the Green Facts below.
Garlic
Last week we talked about the MIC (Minimum Inhibitory Concentration) for allicin as compared to other metabolites within crushed garlic. Remember that the MIC value for any substance is its ability to stop the growth of a specific microorganism of interest. It is used to rate the effectiveness of a substance as an antimicrobial.
Allicin is regarded unequivocally as the most potent antimicrobial substance within the Allium family of plants, and garlic is the number one producer of allicin in the genera. What other factors must we consider in order that allicin may fulfill its potential as an effective human antimicrobial?
Number One: Knowing how much to take. Corresponding to this is being able to determine how much allicin you have in a given product. Let’s do the math:
- Our Organic Freeze Dried Garlic assays at 26,800ppm (parts per million) alliin. Alliin is the precursor molecule to allicin. When a clove is crushed or bitten into by a pest, the inner cellular compartments separating the enzyme alliinase from the alliin are breached, thus enabling a reaction to occur, which is the production of the antimicrobial compound allicin, plus other thiosulfinates.
- One of our capsules contains 400mg of freeze dried whole garlic powder (each capsule contains 4 to 5 cloves. The enzyme and precursor can’t react because there is no moisture to enable the reaction).
- Multiply 26,800ppm times 400mg and divide that by one million and you will get 10.72mg of allicin (In sourcing garlic we take great effort, as we do with all of our raw material sourcing, to find cloves with extremely high alliin content. The industry standard for high potency garlic is around 10,000ppm. So you can see how profoundly powerful a clove at 26,800ppm is.)
- Next divide the 10.72mg of allicin by 2.2 because it takes two moles of alliin to make one mole of allicin and you get 4.87mg of allicin.
- Therefore under ideal conditions, to be described in a moment, each capsule produces 4.87mg of allicin.
Number Two: What does it mean to have ideal conditions? Lets take a look.
- The enzyme alliinase is damaged by too acidic conditions. For example, if you take one of our garlic capsules on an empty stomach with a resting pH of 2.5 to 3 there will be a certain amount of damage done to the enzyme alliinase before it can react with the alliin. The way around this is to take the garlic with a meal, as the net pH of a full stomach is around 4 to 4.5, and at that pH level a full conversion to allicin is possible. Allicin itself is not sensitive to acid.
- Another method to achieve a high quantity of allicin is by opening up a capsule into a glass of water and allowing it to react for a few minutes. You will get the full amount of allicin produced. This way also allows you to treat your mouth, sinuses and esophagus on the way down to the stomach and the intestines. Remember garlic is effective against P. gingivalis, P. aeruginosa and H.pylori. In fact, it is very effective, with extremely low MICs —1.7, 15, and 6-30, respectively. Remember the lower the MIC the more potent antimicrobial a substance is. These are very low MICs against the pathogenic bugs, with P. gingivalis being the primary organism associated with periodontal disease, P. aeruginosa being the epitome of an opportunistic pathogen affecting many tissue especially the sinuses, and H. pylori being the organism responsible for most ulcers and gastritis.
Number Three: Making the claim of ajoene in relation to allicin understandable. Lets do the math.
- One of the products in the market place has a label claim of 1% ajoene per gram, which translates to 10mg per gram or 4 mg ajoene per each 400mg capsule. In math terms the amounts are roughly the same: 4.87 mg allicin per capsule in the Freeze Dried Garlic to the 4 mg ajoene (an allicin/oil metabolite) in the other.
- However, we learned in last week’s newsletter that the comparison of the MICs for each of the products proves that allicin is a much stronger antimicrobial because of its lower MIC values.
- Furthermore, even though their major claim is the stability of ajoene, the allicin in garlic, taken properly, is not only stable, but also potent! Ajoene’s MIC value is not low enough to render it an effective antimicrobial agent as whole garlic, which goes to show the fact that the less we process food—the better and more potent it is therapeutically. It is one thing to extract whole ingredients, such as polyphenols, but another to process food out of its own natural form.
To be continued next week.
Sincerely yours,
Seann Bardell
BioImmersion.com
Clinical Note:
My newest discovery as an effective way to consume regularly the Cruciferous Sprout Complex in the powdered form. Take one heaping tablespoon of the Beta Glucan Complex + one rounded tablespoon of the Cruciferous Sprout Complex + your choice of protein power. Mine has been two heaping tablespoon of a good whey protein (lately I have been experimenting with a combination powdered goat milk/whey protein). Add these to a large glass of water (or diluted juice) and drink immediately with your other pills (in my case its 2 Wild Blueberry Daily, 2 Organic Garlic, 2 Fructo Borate and a few other non BioImmersion products). The drink is very palatable! As an added benefit, since the summer is approaching, you can blend it with frozen banana, berries or melons and make it a great breakfast or an afternoon delight. And, most importantly look at the powerfully good stuff that is being put in the body. Really try it—it is that good.
The Last Quiz Answer: This is a Red Fox pup. The red fox is by far the most widespread and abundant species of fox, found in almost every single habitat in the Northern Hemisphere, from the coastal marshes of United States, to the alpine tundras of Tibetan Plateau. It is capable of co-existing with more specialized species of foxes, such as Arctic fox, in the same habitat. It is nowhere near extinction, and its amazing adaptiveness is driving many other less competent species into extinction.
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Social JusticeI have a real treat for you here. The first of which is to make sure you are aware of Michael Sandel’s book—Justice: What’s The Right Thing To Do?
And, the second is to give you a taste of his work through being able to sit in, via the following link, to Professor Sandel’s extremely popular class Justice at Harvard University. Isn’t this why we go to school?
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