No doubt, garlic has many health benefits, but the yogis also discovered, thousands of years before Western science, that garlic is bad for your brain, both on and off meditation. It’s a brain toxin! In this snippet, from a lecture by Dr. Robert C Beck, you’ll learn why.

“The reason garlic is so toxic, the sulphone hydroxyl ion penetrates the blood-brain barrier, just like DMSO [Dimethyl sulfoxide, a solvent you may taste in your mouth shortly after it touches the skin] and is a specific poison for higher-life forms and brain cells.

We discovered this, much to our horror, when I (Bob Beck, DSc) was the world’s largest manufacturer of ethical EEG feedback equipment.

We’d have people come back from lunch that looked clinically dead on an encephalograph, which we used to calibrate their progress. “Well, what happened?” “Well, I went to an Italian restaurant and there was some garlic in my salad dressing!” So we had’em sign things that they wouldn’t touch garlic before classes or we were wasting their time, their money and my time.

Well, we didn’t know why for 20 years later, until I owned the Alpha-Metrics Corporation. We were building biofeed-back equipment and found out that garlic usually desynchronises your brain waves.

So I funded a study at Stanford and, sure enough, they found that it’s a poison. You can rub a clove of garlic on your foot – and you can smell it shortly later on your wrists. So it penetrates the body. This is why DMSO smells a lot like garlic: that sulphone hydroxyl ion penetrates all the barriers including the corpus callosum in the brain.

Any of you who are organic gardeners know that if you don’t want to use DDT, garlic will kill anything in the way of insects.

Now, most people have heard most of their lives garlic is good for you, and we put those people in the same class of ignorance as the mothers who at the turn of the century would buy morphine sulphate in the drugstore and give it to their babies to put’em to sleep.

If you have any patients who have low-grade headaches or attention deficit disorder, they can’t quite focus on the computer in the after-noon, just do an experiment – you owe it to yourselves.

Take these people off garlic and see how much better they get, very very shortly. And then let them eat a little garlic after about three weeks. They’ll say “My God, I had no idea that this was the cause of our problems.” And this includes the de-skunked garlics, Kyolic, some of the other products.

Very unpopular, but I’ve got to tell you the truth.”

Source: From a lecture by Dr. Robert C Beck, DSc, given at the Whole Life Expo, Seattle, WA, USA, in March 1996, Nexus Magazine.

In another study of garlic’s physical side-effects, it was found that it generates “pain signals” in the spine. From a yogic point of view, one wonders: what does this do to my kundalini?

“What are the side effects of garlic?
Although health benefits of garlic are frequently reported, excessive intake can have harmful effects.
In a rat study, allicin, the main pungent ingredient in garlic, was found to be an activator of TRPA1.

The neurons released neurotransmitters in the spinal cord to generate pain signals and released
neuropeptides at the site of sensory nerve activation, resulting in vasodilation as well as
inflammation. [2]

Other side effects include headache, itching garlic odor on breath and skin,
occasional allergic reactions, stomach disorders and diarrhea, decrease in serum protein and calcium
levels, association with bronchial asthma, contact dermatitis and complaints of garlic smell [5A] ”

See both the positives and negatives here: http://www.zhion.com/GARLIC.html