For years now, I have seen garlic both in diet and supplemental form help bring people’s blood pressure down. So, it was nice to see a study comparing how garlic works compared to a major blood pressure drug: atenolol. No surprise to me: it came out just as good or even better than the drug. But, of course, it’s not so easy to patent garlic, is it? (Having said that, pharma has patented a fish oil!)
Here’s the abstract for you:
Effects of Allium sativum (Garlic) on systolic and diastolic blood pressure in patients with essential hypertension.
Essentially 210 patients with high blood pressure were divided into 7 groups of thirty. The first five groups were given garlic at 300-1500mg per day in divided doses for 24 weeks.
The last 2 groups were given either Atenolol or a placebo.
The researchers measured the blood pressure at the start and then on weeks 12 and 24 to see if there were any changes. They concluded that the results showed:
significant decrease in both Systolic and Diastolic blood pressure in both dose and duration dependent manner. In each garlic treated group, significant reduction in SBP [systolic] and DBP [diastolic] (p<0.005) were observed when compared with atenolol (P<0.005) and placebo.
GreenMedInfo took a closer look at the actual tabled results and they reckoned that:
in each garlic treated group, significant reduction in systolic and diastolic blood pressure were observed when compared with atenolol and placebo. In fact, the higher doses of garlic (1200 mg/1500 mg) were technically superior to atenolol in lowering blood pressure.
How fab is that?! Surely worthy of more research. You can see the tables themselves if you click the link above to GMI.
Now, as you know, I am not going to say ‘throw away your meds and stick with the garlic’ as that would be daft, but I have seen many times over the years where blood pressure drugs no longer actually do any good for some people. I think it might be something to do with the body adapting to it or something but I have no idea. However, if you are one of those, or your blood pressure is a little on the high side/being monitored/you are resisting starting meds, a bit of extra garlic might be worth considering. Yay, more curries! And the turmeric is fab for you too 🙂
I’ve written about garlic before, of course. See Garlic For High Cholesterol and here for a lovely garlicky recipe! See here too for Blueberries: An Alternative for Blood Pressure.
Related articles
- Garlic Beats Best-Selling Blood Pressure Drug In New Study (healthimpactnews.com)
Garlic, you can never have enough! Garlic ice cream is surprisingly nice too 😉
However, I understood that the medicinal qualities of garlic were lost very quickly after cutting/chopping and also in cooking. Meaning you need to eat it raw. Now I like the taste of it raw, but I prefer not to continue tasting it for hours afterwards!
Micki do you have a view on raw versus cooked for the claims? Do you have a recommended garlic capsule for anyone who doesn’t fancy crunching on a clove or two before breakfast!
I always think raw is best but is hardly social! And garlic ice-cream. Ugh, The mere thought! Most manufacturers will protect the allicin/alliin content by freeze-drying it so it is a good second-best. I have always like AOR garlic products as I think they are well-made. And a lot of other garlic products are combined with other things which wouldn’t be right for this type of use. eg rosemary in some, which is not so good for blood pressure. Biotin in others so messes around with your other supplements. AOR used to do bearlic garlic which was superb but they have replaced it with this one which I think looks a goodie. It is alkalised, standardised and delayed release. AOR are always a bit more expensive but you get what you pay for. Their multi is still the best around by a long shot.