Increasing Garlic's Health Benefits

I love garlic. It is yummy and really healthy, too. And recently I read that waiting 10 minutes between chopping your garlic and cooking it preserves the anti-cancer properties (and anti-inflamatory, anti-fungal, and anti-atherosclerotic properties)!

Mostly, that's all you need to know. But if you quest for more nerd knowledge, like I do, there are two compounds in garlic that are separated from each other by the cell walls. When the cell walls are cut, the two compounds combine, do some enzymatic magic, and form allicin. (Allicin is the anti-cancer, anti-everything-bad compound.)

This is why you need to wait to eat the garlic, even if you're eating it raw. It needs time for the enzymatic action to create allicin.

Awesome! And research shows (this is one of my favorite phrases, by the way. I use it frequently. [I'm a nerd.]) that rats fed garlic that was cooked (but didn't sit for 10 minutes) showed no health benefits and rats fed garlic that was chopped, sat, and then cooked DID show health benefits.

So mince, wait, and enjoy the health benefits.