The best remedy for a cold is cheaper than a package of cold pills and faster working. Chances are you already have this amazing remedy in your kitchen: garlic.
The Many Benefits of Garlic
Garlic is a powerful, natural antibacterial, antiviral and antifungal. In fact, you can even use it for skin infections by rubbing raw garlic on the infected area.
I mention garlic whenever I hear that someone has a cold or a sinus infection. Sadly, people tend to turn to cold medicine and antibiotics rather than this cheap, natural solution. I can tell you from personal experience that garlic is much more effective! Years ago, I suffered from chronic sinusitis. Being a flight attendant did not help my condition. For an entire year, I was constantly stuffed up and infected. I had taken every cold medicine there is. I was addicted to a popular nasal spray, and I found that I couldn’t breathe while lying down without it. I was on antibiotics every other month. The antibiotics cleared up the infection, but only temporarily. After almost a year of suffering, I learned about garlic. Since I began using this remedy I have not taken another cold pill or antibiotic, and my sinuses have never been better. I take garlic at the first sign of a cold or infection, and it never turns into a full-blown illness!
Garlic acts as a decongestant and an expectorant. By helping the mucus move normally through the lungs, it can prevent an upper respiratory infection from starting. It also has anti-inflammatory properties, which is helpful because inflammation is a common cause of respiratory infections. Perhaps the most amazing benefit of garlic, however, is that it contains allicin. Allicin is a compound that acts as an antibiotic when crushed. Unlike antibiotic drugs, our bodies do not develop resistance to it.
It is your immune system’s job to destroy biological threats before they turn into illness. However, we often assault our immune system with poor diet, chemical exposure and stress. Garlic is a powerful immune booster and taking it can help our immune systems to heal our bodies.
Another benefit of garlic is that it detoxifies. Garlic has sulfur-containing compounds that activate liver enzymes. Those liver enzymes expel toxins from the body. The allicin and selenium in garlic protect the liver from damage.
There is also evidence that garlic increases the immune system’s natural killer cells. For this reason, it is believed that garlic may be helpful in fighting cancer. With all the great benefits of this herb, it certainly couldn’t hurt!
Garlic is also powerful in fighting tuberculosis, diarrhea, Candida infections, staph, dysentery and typhoid.
How to take Garlic
Most people enjoy garlic in their cooking. However, when garlic is cooked, allicin, the compound that acts as an antibiotic, is destroyed. You can still get benefits from cooked garlic, but the antibiotic benefits as well as the immune boosting benefits will be lost. Garlic supplements are not good options either as many of them have little or none of the helpful garlic compounds. The best way to take garlic for a respiratory infection is to consume it raw. Two cloves a day is the recommended dose. You can do this one of two ways – you can crush it and swallow it, or you can mince it and float it in a glass of water and drink it quickly. If you crush it, you can take it with honey (I recommend raw honey, as it has many health benefits that processed honey doesn’t have). You can also pick up a jar of garlic stuffed olives, which are quite tasty.
Of course, the drawback of this remedy is the smell. You can chew parsley to eliminate bad breath. However, garlic eaten in high quantities may cause an odor to come out your pores when you sweat. I suppose you are hoping I will provide a solution for this. If you are taking garlic to fight an infection, you only need to use it until the infection is gone. This will likely be for a few days, and that should not be long enough to significantly affect your sweat. People with chronic health conditions, however, may want to make it part of their daily routine. Probably the best way to get rid of the smell is to visit a sauna and sweat it out.
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