Transcription
I have three jars of garlic everyday. One is raw cloves of garlic, the other black garlic, and then aged garlic extract. They all came from the same plant. Two of these do almost nothing for the plaque inside your arteries. Evidence-based [music] anyways.
One of them has three randomized controlled trials showing it shrinks the most dangerous plaque in your heart, the soft kind [music] that ruptures and causes heart attacks and can kill you. The problem is most people eat the wrong one every single morning assuming they are protected.
Now, I'm Dr. Kevin Ham. Just over a year ago, I had measurable 20 to 25% plaque in both of my own carotid arteries. Today, after diet, fasting, cycling, and a stack of targeted foods and supplements I'll show you, that plaque has reversed 100% on ultrasound in just 3 months. I still have severely blocked coronary arteries, so I take this very seriously, and I'm determined to reverse as much of this plaque as I can. As medical studies have shown, it's possible. So, when I tell you which garlic actually reaches your coronary arteries and which one only reaches your breath, this isn't just theory. I run this protocol on my own body. Let me show you exactly what the evidence says.
So, I had a question as I religiously ate my raw garlic, black fermented garlic, and sometimes my aged garlic extract supplement. I chop two raw cloves of garlic into two tablespoons of natto every single morning. I also am eating four cloves of black garlic in my salad and on my open-faced sandwich. I do these two forms of garlic daily, but I only occasionally take aged garlic extract supplements. I miss some days.
Most doctors shrug and say garlic is healthy. Eat it if you like. That answer is not comprehensive enough. These three preparations are not three doses of the same medicine. They are three different molecules with three completely different fates inside your body. Once you understand that, you will never read a garlic label the same way again.
So, start with the raw clove, the one your nose trusts. When you crush or chop garlic, an enzyme inside the cell fires within seconds and creates allicin. Allicin is a sharp, eye-watering, pungent compound everyone associates with garlic's power. My first demonstration of this is when I just ate one raw clove of garlic, started chewing it, and I had an intense burning down my throat.
Allicin is a molecule least likely to ever reach a bloodstream intact. Allicin is chemically unstable. It starts falling apart within minutes. Warmth speeds up the breakdown. Stomach acid destroys most of what is left, and the rest is metabolized almost instantly. Researchers have struggled to even detect intact allicin in human blood because it's gone long before it can be absorbed. So, that raw garlic in your natto gives you a little bit of allicin at the cutting board, and then by the time it's fermented, swallowed, and through your stomach, the part that made it powerful is essentially gone.
So, before I tell you which jar actually has the trial evidence, I want you to commit. Comment raw if you think the pungent raw clove is the one that reverses plaque. Comment aged if you think it's the extract. Comment black if you think it's the fermented one. Don't scroll. Lock in your answer first. Got your answer? Good, because the truth surprises almost everyone, including most physicians.
The winner is aged garlic extract. Aged garlic extract is made by soaking sliced garlic in aqueous ethanol for as long as 20 months. Hence the word aged. During that long aging, the unstable allicin is deliberately converted into a stable water-soluble compound called S-allyl-cysteine, so or or SAC for short. The harshness of allicin disappears, the smell softens, what is left is built for one job, absorption. SAC is absorbed at 65 to 98% and circulates measurably in your blood.
This fact is important because you can't run a serious trial on a molecule you can't even find in your bloodstream. You can't measure allicin, but you can measure SAC. So, aged garlic extract becomes the only form scientists could actually test against coronary imaging. The compound your tongue thinks is the hero, allicin, is nearly absent in the extract. The real worker, SAC, is one most people have never heard of.
For decades, garlic would be judged by cholesterol and blood pressure numbers. They hint at heart disease, they don't prove reversal. The real [music] test is imaging the coronary arteries directly and asking, "Did the plaque shrink?" There are three randomized trials that asked exactly that, and all three used aged garlic extract.
So, number one, Matsumoto in 2016 in the Journal of Nutrition. He had 55 patients taking 2400 mg of aged garlic extract or placebo daily for one full year. With CT taking pictures of the coronary arteries with contrast dye before and after. Here's the result that matters. The soft, vulnerable, rupture-prone plaque, the kind that actually causes heart attacks, went backwards. It regressed by 1.5% in the garlic group, while it grew in placebo. And that result was rock solid. It had a P value of 0.0049, which is statistically significant, and it held up after adjusting for age, medications, and every risk factor they could think of. The dangerous plaque shrank.
Now, you've probably seen the headline that garlic slowed total plaque buildup by 80%. Total plaque grew by 0.3% on garlic versus 1.6% on placebo. However, in a trial this small, that 80% number didn't quite reach statistical significance. The bulletproof finding is actually in the soft plaque regression. So, I lead with that, and I'll let the 80% be an added bonus. The hard calcium didn't move either, which makes sense because calcium is old scar tissue, not active disease.
Shik in 2020, same 2400 mg, 12-month protocol, this time in 80 type 2 diabetics. Soft plaque regressed again significantly. P value was 0.0415. That means it's statistically significant. And here's the elegant part. Total and fibrous plaque barely moved again, which means garlic is selectively reversing the soft, inflamed, lipid-rich plaque, the exact plaque you most want gone.
Rosinska in 2020, a Swedish trial, showed aged garlic extract slowed coronary calcium progression while also dropping C-reactive protein, interleukin-6, which is an inflammatory cytokine, blood pressure as well. Three trials, all randomized, all double-blind, all placebo-controlled, all 1 year. The yearly effect looks modest, but 1.5% of soft plaque reversed every year against a placebo arm that keeps growing, compounding 15 to 18% of separation over a decade. In a world where almost everyone's plaque grows, slowing it is good, and reversing it is extraordinary.
Most people assume garlic acts like a statin and lowers cholesterol. That's not the main story. Aged garlic extract's real job is not lowering how much cholesterol you have, it's making your cholesterol safer and your artery lining healthier.
First, nitric oxide. Garlic boosts the enzyme that makes nitric oxide and supplies the raw material for it. Nitric oxide is the master switch of a healthy artery, as we know. When it's high, vessels relax, inflammation falls, and plaque stabilizes.
Second, oxidation. Plaque starts when LDL gets oxidized and immune cells swallow it and turn it into foam cells, the beginning of plaque. Garlic directly blocks that oxidation, calms the inflammatory signal inside the artery wall, and reduces the sticky molecules that recruit those immune cells in the first place.
And third, garlic activates sirtuin 1. This is the sirtuin, the same longevity protein your body switches on during fasting. That's why garlic and a real reversal protocol amplify each other instead of competing.
This is exactly where it fits for me. I'm 13 months into my own reversal protocol, a whole-food plant-based diet under 25 g of fat, so 10% of fat daily, daily 16-18 hour fast, weekly 1-day fast, and monthly 2-3 day [music] fast. High-intensity cycling on the North Shore Mountains three to four times a week. And a compound stack that includes aged garlic extract alongside nattokinase, uh, vitamin K2 MK-7 long-acting form, and pomegranate juice. My carotid plaque reversed on ultrasound in 3 months with, uh, just a simple whole-food plant-based diet and exercise and some fasting. So, there was garlic I had uh, started, but not the aged garlic extract regularly. It wasn't just the garlic. Every one of these pieces played an important role. And aged garlic extract enhances by supplying the nitric oxide, lowering oxidation, increasing sirt one all at once. I added two cloves of garlic, then black fermented garlic daily. I'm now going to do regularly do the aged garlic extract supplements.
Its evidence is weaker for plaque regression than the whole food plant-based low-fat diet, the pomegranate juice, the 50 mils a day, and the nattokinase 10,800 fibrinolytic units. But it comes in a distant fourth. There are other supplements that rival its results that also research and contemplate whether to add to my own daily protocol. I look for 80/20 levers, but also the 1% compounding effects over time. Garlic is more like the 1% compounding effect rather than the huge 80/20 lever like pomegranate or nattokinase or the low-fat whole food plant-based diet.
So here's the practical version. If you want to document the documented plaque effect, number specific, standardized aged garlic extract, 2,400 mg a day split as 1,200 with breakfast, 1,200 with dinner. Taken with food for at least 12 months because the benefit does not show up in just 6 weeks.
To match that dose with raw cloves, you would need 7 to 10 cloves a day crushed and eaten raw, and even then you would not hit the same blood levels, nor would be the same compound SAC. It's not realistic, and the trials have tested raw garlic and dried powder came back null. So don't throw away the raw garlic in your natto. Keep chopping it. It earns its place on flavor, on gut and mouth antimicrobial action, and on general health. Just stop asking it to do a job it can't do, which is reverse plaque. And don't let black garlic fool you either. It's rich in antioxidants, genuinely promising, but it does not yet have the coronary imaging trials that we just learned about.
The lesson is bigger than garlic. The form a compound takes decides its fate in your body far more than the plant it came from. So, this is the same clove of garlic, three completely different destinies.
So, one safety note, aged garlic extract is a real blood thinner through platelet effects. If you take an anticoagulant or have surgery coming up, talk to your physician before you start. This channel is education, not a prescription.
So, tell me, which garlic is sitting in your kitchen right now? Raw, aged, or black garlic? And did this video change which one you reach for? Comment below, I'll read them, and I want to know if your guess at the start matched the evidence. I'll see you at the next video.
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