Garlic and Its Amazing Benefits

I want to take a short break from my story to do a post that is simple and great information. During one of our first Holistic Health with Holly gatherings, we discussed the amazing benefits of garlic and how to get it into our diets more. 

I have a particular affinity for garlic because it has been one of my most faithful remedies in natural health. When anyone in our family starts to get sick, we eat raw garlic and it almost always does the trick to keep illness at bay. I have been known to put it in my kids' oatmeal in the morning. And my 5-year-old will ask me for a tortilla with coconut oil and garlic if he is feeling sick at all. 

The amazing thing is that it truly does work! It also has some other amazing health benefits, so read on for more inspiration for getting more garlic in your diet!

Garlic: The True Miracle Drug

Garlic has been used as both food and medicine in many cultures for thousands of years, dating at least as far back as when the Giza pyramids were built.

Hippocrates, Galen, Pliny the Elder, and Dioscorides all mention the use of garlic for many conditions, including parasites, respiratory problems, poor digestion, and low energy.

Garlic cloves are used as a remedy for infections (especially chest problems), digestive disorders, and fungal infections such as thrush.[81][82] Garlic can be used as a disinfectant because of its bacteriostatic and bactericidal properties.[4]

In 1924, it was found to be an effective way to prevent scurvy, because of its high vitamin C content.[83]

Garlic is excellent for:
*Cardiovascular health

*Anti-inflammatory benefits

*Powerful anti-viral and anti-bacterial benefits

*Anti-Cancer benefits

*Antioxidants

The sulfur compounds in garlic are perhaps its most unique nutrients. There are literally dozens of well-studied sulfur molecules in garlic, and virtually all of them have been shown to function as antioxidants. In addition, many provide us with anti-inflammatory benefits. 

Additionally, garlic is an excellent source of manganese and vitamin B6. It is also a very good source of vitamin C and copper. And garlic is a good source of selenium, phosphorus, vitamin B1, and calcium.

Garlic is very important to eat every day. It will help to normalise your gut flora and stimulate the immune system. It is important to have it raw with meats or cooked as a part of the meal. Work on using a whole head of garlic every day (not just a few cloves).

My Holistic Health Journey Part 2

During my first season of beginning to learn more about changing the way I ate and fed my family, I also began to feel very confused. My desire to eat healthy had really taken off, but navigating the world of conflicting information related to this was overwhelming. I would learn about food combining, then hear about the benefits of eating vegetarian, then learn about how great the Atkins diet was, and the confusion only mounted. I watched a video on Gersen Therapy, which was so enlightening and talked a lot about people getting healed from cancer using natural means and radical diet changes.

But this season ended with me having made progress in what we ate, like not eating refined white flours and sugars anymore, eating more vegetables, and avoiding high fructose corn syrup at all costs, but that was about as far as it got.

Then about 2 or 3 years later my husband bought me a fascinating book called "Why Christians Get Sick." Knowing what I now know, I can't say I actually recommend this book unless you are over 50 and have a somewhat serious disease like cancer or an autoimmune disease like fibromyalga. But for me it was the catalyst of my health journey going to the next level. It makes a strong case for a raw, vegan diet and shares many testimonies of people getting healed of all sorts of diseases by radically changing the way they ate. I was convinced and immediately began to implement what I was learning. I began to feed my children raw vegetables like crazy, making them veggie blends for lunch that I would serve them on a corn tortilla. One night I served raw pasta (which is zucchini sliced like linguini) with a raw tomato marinara sauce. Because my taste buds had changed so drastically in the two weeks I had been eating this way, it tasted delicious to me. But the rest of the family were not fans. I stopped eating all meat, and ate highly raw vegan for 6 months. For awhile, I felt amazing. I had more energy than I ever had in my life. I started to feel better and stopped having the stomach problems I had had for so long. I was able to get only about 5 hours of sleep and feel incredibly rested. I think my body was going through a much needed cleanse and began to heal itself in that season.

But the shortcomings of this way of eating began to surface after about 4 months. The amazing energy I had began to wane and I began to feel cold a lot of the time. I had often wondered if this way of eating was truly sustainable and what was best for someone in her childbaring years that was nursing a baby. In my research I learned about warming foods, and realized because I was eating very little cooked foods, I was not getting enough heat and energy in my body, hence the feeling cold all the time. I also knew that when you do not eat meat you are missing B vitamins and some essential amino acids. I knew that the fact that my energy levels were dropping were most likely because of this, which meant I needed to start getting some meat back into my diet. I also heard about a friend of a friend who had eaten this way for years and ended up getting very off balance and sickly from not having animal products in his diet for so long.

So, I began my journey into balance. But this time with much stronger convictions about what was acceptable and not acceptable to put into my body. One of the major changes was the quality of the food we ate. After learning about the downsides of meat, I decided that if I was going to eat meat, I only wanted to eat high quality meat in the best forms, like organic grass-fed beef, organic pastured chickens, wild caught Alaskan salmon, etc. I knew it was going to be more costly, but since our meals were centered around vegetables and not meat now, it wasn't going to have to cost a ton since we didn't need lots of meat to make the meal.

This post is starting to get pretty long, so I think I will have to stop for now. And I have to say that the story is far from over. It took me a number of years to "balance" out a little more. And I am still learning all the time. But the rest of the story is still worth telling, so until next time...

My Holistic Health Journey Part 1

Many who know me would say I am one of the more extreme people they know. Not necessarily in personality but more in actions. I don't FEEL extreme, I just feel normal. But I think my normal is a bit extreme for most people!

Anyway, my extremeness (according to others) definitely plays out in the way our family lives and eats. But I have some really good reasons for this, and I will share some of those reasons as I write my personal story of my journey into health.



I grew up with healthy values when it came to eating and lifestyle. My parents did a great job of feeding us healthy food and teaching us what was healthy and what was not, to the best of their knowledge. However, I also grew up during the era of margarine being healthier than butter, low-fat being healthier than full fat, whole wheat bread being the healthy option as opposed to white bread, and the list goes on. As long as you have your veggies on your plate, it doesn't matter if they come from a can, and organic was not a word in almost anyone's vocabulary. However, despite a lack of accessibility to truly healthy food and the information we really needed to implement true healthy eating, the values were instilled and I have benefited my whole life from those values.

Fast forward a few years, and I am now a teenager often making my own decisions about what I eat. I did not have a picky palette at all, and was not very educated on food and its health value, so I ate what some now refer to as the Standard American Diet. Pretty much whatever was available was what I ate. And I also had stomach problems, but of course I didn't know enough to connect the two!

In college my stomach problems only got worse. My diet coupled with strong antibiotics after a surgery, then exacerbated by food poisoning on a Mexico mission trip, caused me to have really painful episodes of stomach cramps, bloating, and diarrhea.

But it wasn't until several years later when I had my first baby and moved into a community living house that I started to finally learn a few things about healthy eating. In our community living home I met my now good friend Camille Macres. She had grown up with a mom that was very into holistic health and healthy eating, so knew a ton about this. She was also in the middle of starting her own business as a personal chef with a bent towards healthy cooking that was also delicious. She was reading tons of books on health and different types of diets, and would teach me what she was learning. She introduced me to a diet focused on vegetables, eating things like sprouted bread, and higher quality food. We began venturing into the local food co-op and got a membership there. (I have found that simply walking around stores like these can help you learn a TON about healthy eating).

I also began to think about food in a new way. As I was feeding my baby his first foods, I began to grapple with the reality that this child who had been born with this perfect digestive system and been fed the perfect food for him (breastmilk) for the first months of his life, was going to now go from eating pureed green beans (homemade of course) to somehow eating pizza and cookies one day. I couldn't fathom the idea of putting those things into his body and wanted so badly to protect him from anything impure going into his precious unadulterated system. This idea made me really start to look at the purpose of what we eat. If I want to protect my baby so badly, why aren't I paying more attention to what I am putting in MY body? If I can so clearly see the purpose of feeding my baby was to promote health and growth, why do I not see it the same way with what I am feeding myself?

TO BE CONTINUED...