by Carol Potera January 1, 1998 Researchers have long suspected that garlic’s benefits extend beyond warding off vampires and bad dates. Now studies from several widely separated institutions have not only confirmed that garlic and its cousin the onion confer major health benefits-including such remarkable feats as fighting infection, cancer, and heart disease-but have also shown how they do it. And in the course of such studies, researchers may have come up with some important new therapeutic agents. One study, led by microbiologist David Mirelman and biochemist Meir Wilchek of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehvot, Israel, found that allicin, a natural sulfur compound that protects garlic from soil parasites and fungi, effectively disables microbes that cause disease in humans. The team discovered that allicin blocks two groups of enzymes that normally empower infectious microbes to invade and survive in host tissue. Because both enzymes are found in a variety
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