A simple trick to get even more benefits from garlic.
Thiosulfinates, garlic with mashed acorn squash, and foods that make a big nutritional difference even in small amounts.
👉This week, we’re talking about: how thiosulfinates improve cardiovascular health; garlic as not only being very rich in thiosulfinates but also containing the most famous member of this phytonutrient family; tips for increasing the thiosulfinate content of fresh garlic; the mindset of looking for opportunities for small additions to up nutrient intake; and I’m sharing my recipe for Mashed Acorn Squash with Forty Cloves of Garlic.
Key Takeaways
✅Thiosulfinates are the class of phytonutrients that make allium vegetables so tasty as well as so beneficial for cardiovascular health.
✅Garlic contains the most famous thiosulfinate, called allicin. You can boost allicin content by chopping or crushing your garlic and letting it sit for ten minutes before adding it to your dish.
✅Garlic is an easy ingredient to add to meals to boost intake of nutritive compounds, but there’s lots of other foods that offer impressive nutrients even when we consume them in very small amounts.
✅For paid subscribers, your companion downloads this week are: Top 10 Thiosulfinate Foods Fridge List and Mashed Acorn Squash with Forty Cloves of Garlic. Check your inbox; they’ll be arriving in a separate email (or if you use the Substack app, they’ll be in their own post).
Thiosulfinates for Cardiovascular Health
🧬Thiosulfinates are the compounds responsible for the distinctive pungent flavor of allium vegetables (such as onions, garlic, shallots, leeks, and chives) and they provide diverse beneficial effects, including powerful anticancer properties as well as antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, and antithrombotic effects.
Thiosulfinates are excellent for reducing cardiovascular disease risk, by lowering total cholesterol and LDL cholesterol, by inhibiting the enzymes involved in cholesterol and fatty acid synthesis, and by reducing platelet clumping and abnormal clot formation. A 2020 systematic review and meta-analysis (including 81 cohort studies and over 4 million subjects!) found that the highest versus lowest consumption of alliums was associated with a 67% lower risk of cardiovascular disease mortality, a 33% lower risk of coronary heart disease mortality, and an 11% lower risk of stroke!
Want to know all the best food sources of thiosulfinates? Learn them here.
Get 81 mg Thiosulfinates with Garlic
🧄Thanks to its phytonutrient content, especially thiosulfinates—along with having impressive amounts per calorie of vitamin B6, vitamin C, manganese, copper, selenium, and fiber—garlic has a sky-high Nutrivore Score of 5622, making it one of the most nutrient-dense foods on the planet!
While at least 19 beneficial thiosulfinates have been identified in various alliums, the most famous example is allicin, produced by the conversion of the alliin in garlic by alliinase when the garlic is sliced or crushed. Allicin has well-established anticancer and antitumor, cardioprotective (including reducing hypertension and hyperlipidemia as well as improving circulation), antibacterial, antifungal and antiparasitic properties in addition immune modulating properties.
A 2019 umbrella review of meta-analyses likewise found that garlic consumption had a powerful cholesterol-lowering effect—with eight weeks of garlic consumption leading to a 17.2 mg/dL drop in total cholesterol levels.
And while fresh garlic has higher levels of thiosulfinates, garlic powder is also a great choice! For example, a 2014 meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials found that garlic powder (in doses ranging from 300 mg to 1400 mg daily, for a period of seven days to one year) lowered triglyceride levels by 15.83 mg/dL, LDL cholesterol levels by 8.11 mg/dL, fasting blood glucose levels by 17.30 mg/dL, and systolic and diastolic blood pressure levels by 4.34 mmHg and 2.36 mmHg, respectively.
Garlic is the 12th most nutrient-dense food! Learn the Top 500 Nutrivore Foods here.
Mashed Acorn Squash with Forty Cloves of Garlic
🥗 This garlic-heavy side dish is so amazingly sweet and delicious thanks to the slow roasting of many garlic cloves. Roasting garlic reduces their pungent-ness and makes them sweet and tender. You will not only be getting the benefits of thiosulfinate-filled garlic, but you will also have the added health promoting properties of carotenoids, vitamin B6 and vitamin C that come along with the winter squash varieties.
What a better way to enjoy the fall, squash season than by jazzing up your autumn table with this show-stopping side dish.
Add this recipe to your meal plan this week with Real Plans, the official Nutrivore meal planning app!
Nutrivore Mindset Corner
🧠When we think about improving diet quality, it’s easy to focus on the big changes—hitting five servings of daily vegetables, adding seafood to the menu, or building breakfasts around the Nutrivore Meal Map. But some of the easiest wins come from the smallest additions. This week’s newsletter highlights the benefits of garlic, but there are many other examples. Garnishing your dinner with just one tablespoon of parsley provides roughly half the Daily Value for vitamin K. Sprinkling one tablespoon of chia seeds over your breakfast yogurt bowl or lunch side salad adds three and a half grams of fiber plus two and a half grams of heart-healthy alpha-linolenic acid. And here’s a fun one: adding 2 tablespoons of unsweetened cocoa powder to your morning smoothie will add four grams of fiber and 13% DV magnesium.
This is one reason I often talk about easy additions as much as I talk about major dietary shifts. Fresh herbs, spices, garnishes, mushrooms, nuts and seeds, seaweed, citrus zest, and other nutrient-dense ingredients can up the nutritional value of meals without changing what you’re eating. Over the course of a week, those small additions can add up to a surprisingly broad spectrum of beneficial nutritive compounds.
The Nutrivore mindset isn’t about chasing perfection, it’s about looking for opportunities, like adding garlic to your roasted vegetables, sprinkling parsley over dinner, mixing lentils into your ground beef, or tossing a handful of herbs into a soup. Small changes don’t just add up, they compound.
Learn everything you need to know about the Nutrivore philosophy in my book, Nutrivore: Eat Any Food, Get Every Nutrient, and Transform Your Health!
Helpful Tip of the Week
💡This week’s tip requires just a bit of science… An interesting thing about thiosulfinates is that they aren’t even formed until the vegetable is damaged, for example sliced, crushed or chewed. This is because their precursors—antioxidant and immune-modulating S-alk(en)yl-L-cysteine sulfoxides (like alliin, the dominant sulfoxide in garlic)—reside in storage cells whereas the lyase enzyme alliinase that metabolizes sulfoxides is found in bundle sheath cells. When the cell membranes are damaged, alliinase and sulfoxides mix, forming a variety of thiosulfinates.
Alliinase is quite heat stable plus some of our gut bacteria produce enzymes with similar biological activity, so we don’t have to crush alliums before eating to benefit from thiosulfinates (see for example, the recipe above!). That being said, when it comes to garlic, we do get significantly more allicin production when we smash, chop, grate, or crush fresh garlic and then let it sit for ten minutes or so at room temperature before adding to whatever dish we’re creating! It’s an easy way to get even more health benefit from an ingredient we’re already consuming.
What I do is always start my meal prep with garlic (if the dish I’m making calls for it, of course). If a recipe calls for grated or crushed garlic, I do so into a bowl and set aside until I need it. If a recipe calls for sliced or chopped garlic, I first smash the clove with the side of my knife, then slice or chop and set aside until I need it. I don’t worry about it being exactly ten minutes, sometimes it’s more and sometimes it’s less, either way, I’m getting extra benefits from allicin production! And if the dish calls for whole roasted heads of garlic, I don’t worry about it and I skip this step.
This Week’s Companion Downloads
📥For paid subscribers, your Companion Downloads this week are:
Top 10 Thiosulfinate Foods Fridge List - This 1-pager PDF guide lists the top 10 common whole food sources of thiosulfinates, how much thiosulfinates you get per serving (and how much a serving is!), while highlighting a few other valuable nutrients each food provides.
Mashed Acorn Squash with Forty Cloves of Garlic - A beautifully-designed PDF version of this week’s recipe that you can save or print out, to build your own personalized Nutrivore Cookbook week by week.
Check your inbox for the Companion Downloads arriving in a separate email (or if you use the Substack app, they’ll be in their own post). You can also find them in the archive here. Thank you so much for supporting my work and Nutrivore!
Sincerely,
Dr. Sarah Ballantyne, PhD
Founder of Nutrivore