It’s not something you would eat before a date, but if you think that all garlic does is give you bad breath, you’re sadly mistaken. This spicy herb is almost a wonder drug that has a host of medicinal properties and a large number of health benefits.

• It is a powerful antioxidant and helps reduce the number of free radicals in your body. This means that it slows down aging and prevents diseases like cancer. A study conducted by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and the Ontario Ministry of Innovation has found that garlic is very effective in trapping free radicals because of the allicin it contains. This compound contains sulfenic acid which reacts very quickly with free radicals to “trap” them and so prevent them from causing cancerous tumors. While onions and shallots are rich in allicin too, they don’t have the same antioxidant properties that garlic does because they have a lower level of sulfenic acid, leading to a slower reaction rate with free radicals.
• It is good in controlling your healthy cholesterol levels – garlic brings down the level of bad cholesterol in your blood.
• It is a great natural antibiotic that protects you from a host of illnesses. And the best part is that because it is natural, your body does not build a resistance to it like it does to other antibiotics.
• It lowers your blood pressure and prevents strokes and heart attacks. (more…)

Research being carried out on foods and their nutrient content are showing something that should come as no surprise – that the foods that our grandmothers said were good for us, really are. They are so packed with vitamins and minerals and many other nutrients that come with astounding health benefits, that they are sometimes labelled ‘superfoods’. There’re many such ‘superfoods’, but they have one thing in common: they are unprocessed, ‘real’ food.

Superfoods include oats, beans, nuts, carrots, broccoli, spinach, tomatoes, strawberries, mushrooms, salmon, soybeans, and yogurt, among many others. We discuss four of these superfoods here.

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