Garlic is a special kind of vegetable. Pungent odor, long history, various "efficiency" legends. Many studies on the efficacy of garlic can also be found in scientific literature. From ingredient analysis, animal experiments, epidemiological investigations, and even interventional control experiments, the conclusion is that "the evidence is not sufficient, but there is no denial." In the dazzling market of various garlic products, something called “Black Garlic” was born and claimed to have “lower blood pressure, lower blood pressure, lower blood sugar, soften blood vessels, improve sleep, and improve constipation. Mitigation effect." What is black garlic? Is there really such a powerful feature?

What is black garlic?

Black garlic is not a special garlic variety, but is a product of ordinary garlic that has undergone special processing. Its history is short-lived. It has only been a decade since the Koreans invented it. Garlic's legendary "health care function" has appealed to many people, coupled with an improvement in the flavor of garlic, and more importantly, an increase in "active ingredients," and black garlic has achieved considerable success in the market. . Koreans even opened a company in the United States to sell black garlic products. The products are still quite appealing in the market.

The production of black garlic is not complicated, but it is long. In simple terms, the fresh garlic is heated for more than a month under high temperature and high humidity, even for two or three months. Including some scientific literature, many places introduced this process as "fermentation" when introducing black garlic. Some people think that this is a misnomer, because the temperature of black garlic is about 60 °C, or even higher, at this temperature, all kinds of microorganisms are difficult to grow. So they think that this process is not involved with microorganisms, mainly "non-enzymatic browning" caused by prolonged heating at low temperature, or oxidation. This process is somewhat similar to the "blush" of black tea.

After a few days of continuous heating, fresh garlic became black garlic. Garlic becomes soft and sweet, and its characteristic irritating odor disappears. For many people, the flavor of black garlic is more attractive.

What's in black garlic?

The popularity of black garlic is not due to changes in the taste and taste, but as a "functional food." There are many antioxidants in garlic, such as alliin (S-allyl)

Cysteine) and various polyphenol compounds. These substances exhibited good antioxidant properties in chemical tests and cell experiments, and some also demonstrated various "health care functions" in animal experiments. Thus, these ingredients are made into various "dietary supplements" sales.

Experiments have found that the content or activity of these substances has greatly increased after the fresh garlic has become black garlic. Different research institutes have selected different detection indicators, with different increases, but generally show a large increase. For example, there are reports that the content of alliin has increased 5 to 6 times. The literature also examined "superoxide dismutase-like activity," "hydrogen peroxide clearance activity," and polyphenol content. The results were 13-fold, 10-fold, and 7-fold increase, respectively.

Why fresh garlic turns into black garlic. Why would these ingredients increase so dramatically? There are three main mechanisms presumed in the literature: one is that some of these ingredients are tightly combined with other substances in fresh garlic, and they are released during prolonged heating; second, there are some reductions or inhibitions in fresh garlic. The enzymes that are active in these materials lose their activity during the production of black garlic, so the activity of these substances increases. Third, during the browning process, simple polyphenols form a polyphenol complex, and the latter's antioxidant activity. The sex is much stronger - in black tea, the formation of theaflavins by catechins results in a significant increase in antioxidants, a similar example.

What are the functions of black garlic?

Since those “functional ingredients” have indeed increased substantially, are those “functions” of black garlic reliable?

From the point of view of food regulation, because there are some research results that support the function of those substances, and black currant does have many of those ingredients, then it is recognized as a “functional food”.

However, there is still a considerable distance between "the presence of functional ingredients" and "embodiments in the human body." Black garlic was invented only for a decade, and the current research is mainly to detect composition changes. A small number of animal tests cannot be considered sufficient.

In 2014, a scholar published by Taiwan Scholars in the Journal of Functional Food reported a fairly complete animal experiment. They fed rats with a normal diet, a high-fat diet, a high-fat diet plus different doses of black garlic extract, and then tested for changes in body weight and various physiological parameters. The results showed that, compared with the high-fat diet group, rats with high-fat diet supplemented with black garlic extract, the final body weight, liver and adipose tissue relative weight, serum triglyceride, liver oxidative stress levels Obviously low, many indicators are close to rats eating a normal diet. Further analysis found that mice fed the high-fat diet supplemented with black garlic extract had higher fat content in the feces. This corresponds to the fact that the black garlic extract reduces the absorption of fat in the diet and may explain that the weight and physiological index of the mice supplemented with the black garlic extract are close to the normal diet group.

The authors of the paper believe that obesity may come from excessive energy intake, or it may result from an imbalance in energy metabolism. Energy is converted into triglycerides and stored in fat cells. Therefore, regulating fat production, decomposition, and oxidation of fatty acids is one of the ways to control body fat accumulation. In their study, a number of enzymes associated with these biochemical processes were also tested and found that the expression levels of various enzymes have changed. Based on these changes, they also proposed a mechanism model for the efficacy of black garlic extract.

From a scientific perspective, this is a good study. However, it is only an animal experiment after all. The situation in the human body remains to be further studied.

As for the “anticancer” effect of black garlic, there are only some very preliminary laboratory studies that have not been truly confirmed.

At present, it seems that black garlic is a unique food. It does not hurt to eat properly. But if you count on it to prevent and treat diseases, you still wake up, not too naive.