杏吧原创

EATING as little as half a clove of raw garlic per day in a salad might
protect you against bowel cancer.

Better known for helping you avoid heart disease, garlic also protects
against bowel cancer. Rex and Christine Munday, a husband-and-wife team at the
New Zealand government鈥檚 Ruakura Agricultural Research Centre in Hamilton,
wanted to find out how much garlic you needed to benefit. They fed rats for five
days at a time with varying doses of diallyl disulfide, the substance in garlic
reckoned to have the most potent anticancer properties. Disulfide makes the gut
produce enzymes that purge it of cancer-causing substances.

The Mundays found that levels of these enzymes rose by 20 to 60 per cent at
doses matching modest intakes in humans. 鈥淚t鈥檚 been recognised that garlic is an
inducer of these enzymes, but previous studies have all been with doses at
meaningless levels,鈥� says Rex Munday. 鈥淭hey implied you鈥檇 need to eat your own
weight in garlic to achieve beneficial effects.鈥�

In the rats, beneficial daily doses of disulfide were between 0.075 and 0.3
milligrams per kilogram of body weight. That鈥檚 equivalent to about half a clove
for humans鈥攂ut you鈥檇 need to consume nine times as much if you cook it.
The paper will appear in Nutrition and Cancer (vol 34, p 42).