Health benefits of garlic and other poisons

Cecil's Columns/Staff Reports
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One of my pet peeves is the American imbicility towards the truism that the dose makes the poison, not the substance. Water will kill you if you have too much, and so will vitamins, minerals, sugar, and just about every chemical you can think of (hell, does anyone know a substance for which that wouldn’t happen). Yet they keep going on and on in their paranoid state about the slightest bit of contamination or shadow of a danger. Even when the amounts are not entirely insignificant, they do not comprehend that the several orders of magnitude between the topic of conversation and a gravely harmful dose DO make a world of difference.

However, what angers me most of all is that not only can small doses of poisons simply never be called “poisons” in any sense of the word, but that there is good evidence that they are actually BENEFICIAL. The reason for this is simple. The body is lazy, and it will do absolutely nothing unless it feels like it has to. That’s why your muscles atrophy and your immune system becomes weak, and your lungs become inefficient, and… on and on and on. Things like excercise, which is actually quite damaging to the body in the short term, only end up calling the body to action and making you stronger in the long term. Of course saying “whatever doesn’t kill me…” is incorrect, but “whatever shakes me up a bit…” is rather hard to argue with.

The word for this is hormesis, and here’s an article on it from Discover:
http://www.discover.com/issues/dec-02/features/featradiation/

I think a proper understanding of this phenomenon will not only soothe our frayed nerves and prevent damage (emotional and economic), but it may also lead to breakthroughs in therapies.

Incidientally, hormesis is also roughly the best candidate for the mechanism by which calorie restriction does its work.

Hell, I’ll bet it is also the reason chemotherapy succeeds. How much sense does it make, after all, that simply putting in a toxin that indiscriminantly kills cells in your body will end up doing more harm to the cancer than to you?

There’s also been an interesting story in the news lately. It seems that some people just realized that we’ve been intentionally feeding our chickens arsenic. Apparently, it makes them grow bigger and meatier. My first reaction was that what fool would think, upon hearing that it was making the chickens grow better, that it would only do harm to us. (I mean it’s not a hormone or something that specifically targets growth… it’s mainly knows as simply carcinogenic.) Clearly, this is another example of hormesis at work. And it’s good reason to investigate if perhaps we should be eating some arsenic too.

In general, hormesis is obviously where the idea for homeopathy came from (and no, pseudoscience doesn’t just get invented out of thin air… most lies are grounded in truth). Of course, present-day homeopathy practitioners (at least here in good old America) dissolve the toxins to non-existent concentrations. They talk about “water memory” and other ridiculous bullshit. Hormesis often gets a bad rap from this association. Indeed, it is unfortunate how often scientists have a knee-jerk self-righteous reaction regarding things that have been passed down to them as witty fact for a couple generations. Just look at the recent realization that the century-old belief that lactic acid causes muscle cramps is completely false. The scientist who proved that had to wade through twenty years of criticism… and for what… proving false the retarded idea that an everyday chemical that disperses in hours is directly responsible for a pain that occurs days later?

I wish we would be doing serious research on this, and figuring out precisely the amounts or substances that would yield us most benefit. I think it will also help us understand a great deal of the phenomena with which we’re already familiar. Such as the benefit of garlic, and of wine, and of chemotherapy, and of many other things.

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Hmmm… was this supposed to address the column Is Garlic Oil Lethal?? Cecil clearly stated that the dosage was critical in determining whether the compounds were beneficial or toxic.

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oh, no, i don’t fault cecil for anything. you’re right, the words in his column support my point (if i may claim so).

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I do have a couple of problems with this one.

First, Cecil uses the LD-50 for rats to extrapolate the theoretical LD-50 for humans. While this is a common practice to estimate human casualities, it by no means indicates with any certainty that 50% of a target human population would expire when given the dose extrapolated from a rat study.

He then perpetuates this flaw by using the compound he found with the lowest LD-50, and makes an unstated assumption that the entire fluid consists of this “most lethal” compound.

Garlic (oil) is made up of dozens of compounds. . . The main components of the volatile oil are sulfur compounds, especially allicin, diallyl disulfide, and diallyl trisulfide. (Source: American Botanical Council: http://www.herbalgram.org/default.asp?c=garlic)
So even with double the dose (from 9 to 18 grams) of garlic oil, you may be only getting a fraction of the amount of diallyl disulfide needed to reach an extrapolated LD-50.

The second no-no is extrapolating that if you double the dose, you can ensure the lethality. Nine grams = LD-50 does not mean that 18 grams = LD-100.

In my opinion, this perpetuates the ignorance of the public when it comes to their perception of the hazards of chemicals/toxins/poisons in their lives. I think Cecil can do better!

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First of all, cancer cells are inherently not as healthy as regular cells, so yes, a lot of things will do more harm to the cancer than to the host. Second, the substances that are used for chemotherapy don’t kill indiscriminantly, but have some means of preferentially targetting cancer cells. Most commonly, they specifically target rapidly-dividing cells, which also includes the hair follicles and the lining of the digestive tract (hence why baldness and nausea are common side-effects of chemotherapy). Third, the body of a cancer patient is already under considerable stress, and can be assumed to be reacting to it in some way already, so the notion of stressing the body to jolt it into action seems unfounded in this case.

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Thank you for your clarification regarding chemotherapy.

That’s true. But a rabies vaccine, for example, will help you even if you already have rabies. Cancer, especially in the early stages, does not put that much stress on the body. There isn’t much point arguing this, as I clearly don’t know much about this particular point. However, I would imagine that hormesis would regardless play a role, although we probably can’t tell how great at this point.

I would like to point out, however, that any chemical, even if it targeted cancer with 95% precision, would still leave a great deal of cancer cells behind. Even a single cell can cause cancer, and 5% of a tumor (distributed somewhat throughout tissues), would probably come back with full strength. It is the body’s immune system that must be doing the mop-up. The question is why is it able (at least sometimes) to kill the 5% (or probably much more) afterwards, but not in the beginning.

Also, how long does a cancer treatment last in relation to the timescale of the overall ordeal (in cases where the cancer was defeated)?