A Note on Evidence & Safety
Two commitments governed this volume, and they are worth restating plainly at the close. The first is honesty about medicine. Garlic is among the most mythologised foods on earth, and this book has tried, in its sixth chapter, to report only what the evidence actually supports: a wholesome food with modest, real, measurable effects — reductions on the order of eight millimetres of mercury of systolic blood pressure in people who already have hypertension, and a smaller, conditional fall in cholesterol for those who begin with raised levels — together with some genuine antimicrobial activity in the laboratory dish that does not translate into a proven cure in the living body, and a great deal of enthusiastic overclaim beyond all that. Set against those modest positives is a real, short list of cautions the marketing omits: a proven interaction with certain medicines, a bleeding risk worth minding around surgery and anticoagulants, and a chemical-burn hazard from raw garlic held against the skin. Nothing here is medical advice, and no clove is a cure.
The second is safety. Raw garlic stored in oil at room temperature is a genuine and well-documented risk of Clostridium botulinum — the airless, low-acid, moist interior of a jar of garlic oil is precisely the environment the botulism organism favours, and its toxin carries no smell or taste to warn you. Home-made garlic oils and confit must be kept refrigerated and used within a few days, or acidified, or frozen; commercial garlic-in-oil products are acidified by law for exactly this reason. Black garlic, being a fully aged and cooked product, does not carry this hazard; raw garlic in oil always does. Curiosity in the kitchen is this whole series' delight. It is never worth a reader's health.
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