It’s a known fact that eating garlic and onions make you socially repulsive, but garlic and onions also have known curative properties.
Garlic, for one, is known, and I have personal experience with this, to drastically lower blood cholesterol. The downside is that you have to take it chopped and, yes, raw – for at least 2 weeks. Say goodbye to your non garlic-eating friends.
Onions, as far I’ve heard, is like the anti-flatulence vegetable. According to WikiPedia it has many medicinal properties, but it doesn’t mention purging air as being one of them. But again, personal experience has taught me that onions make you fart, which at least leads to a less bloated stomach.
Recently though, something peculiar happened to me and I haven’t been able to verify it with evidence, anecdotal or otherwise. So here it is.
Super Onions & Super Garlic
Being of the single persuasion recently I have had the freedom to eat as much garlic and onion as I can stomach. It is important to note that my tolerance for garlic and onions (and chillies, for that matter) is quite substantial.
Also of importance is the fact that I have, in the centre of my lower jaw, two teeth that overlap, which are annoyingly prone to plaque buildup. Perhaps because it overlaps in a way that protects it from any but the most stringent, multi-directional-approach tooth brushing.
Anyway, plaque, as you may know, is stubborn and never leaves on its own. So it was quite a surprise when mine did. A little bit at a time.
Dentist Grade Tools
It was only when I went at it with a plaque scrapper (you don’t have one?) that I realise how easily it really came off.
And it made me wonder; what brought this on?
Usually odd things in my body are due to a persistent change in diet, and the only change in my diet has been the edition of serious amounts of garlic and onion. Like 2 or 3 onion and a bulb of garlic at every meal.
So I searched Google to see whether or not the removal of plaque has ever been attributed to garlic and onions, or whether garlic and onions can in fact remove plaque.
I found nothing to answer this question, but having had this experience I can’t help but wonder: do garlic and/or onion somehow work in on plaque to make it easier to remove?
Ooo, interesting. I had the garlic and onion in cooked form, but usually just lightly fried or a little boiled in a broth, enough for the garlic to still have a little bit of crunch to it.
By Google search I found your experience report that I was generically searching for – that garlic could in theory reduce tooth plaque.
Based on my web research, plaque is a film of growing bacteria that re-form near the gum line and elsewhere after every cleaning. When not promptly removed it calcifies into tartar that has to be scrapped off. I do have plaque picks and scrapers for this.
Garlic (and onion??) contains the antibiotic allicin, which has about 1% the strength of penicillin, but being weaker, allicin can be used every day without the side effects of penicillin.
My thought was, could garlic allicin limit the growth of bacterial tooth plaque? Plaque is the cause of receding gums and the greatest cause of tooth loss after age fifty.
Your experience of looser plaque removal suggests that this did happen.
Were the 2 or 3 onions and a bulb of garlic at every meal in cooked or raw form?
You have mentioned the social problem which might be overcome with traditional combined eating of parsley.
Bottled odorless garlic supplements are common, but due to their expense or uncertain quality, can one get enough garlic extract (of the correct kind) to work at all. Will garlic supplement pills and capsules work at least as well as raw or cook garlic? – Assuming that it works at all for most people.
As usual, a public nutrition-health participation report is needed in which enough people try it and report what happened.