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I found a glass jar of pickled garlic in my dead mother's pantry on a Thursday afternoon in March and I sat on her kitchen floor and I cried for 2 hours. Not because of the garlic. Because of what the garlic meant. My mother was 91 years old when she died in her sleep in her own bed in the same house she'd lived in since 1962. She was not on a single prescription medication. Not one. The hospice nurse who came to do the death certificate looked at her medicine cabinet and asked me if we'd cleaned it out already. I told her no, that's what was always in there. Two bottles of Bayer aspirin, a tube of Bengay, and a jar of Vicks VapoRub from probably the Reagan administration. The nurse just stared at me. "In 41 years of doing this, I've never seen a medicine cabinet like that on a 91 year old." My name is Linda. I'm 58. I live in Lansing, Michigan, about an hour and a half from the house in Saginaw where I grew up and where my mother Marjorie raised me and my brother Doug in a one and a half story brick house with a screened porch and a detached garage that always smelled like motor oil and lake water from my dad's tackle box. My mother died on January 11th. We had the funeral on the 16th. Doug flew in from Phoenix and stayed for 4 days and then he flew home and left me with the house, which is what I'd told him I wanted because he has his own life and his own kids and his own everything in Arizona and I'm the one who lives 90 minutes away. I went over to start cleaning out the house on March 3rd. I'd waited almost 2 months because I just couldn't make myself drive up I-75 and put the key in that door knowing she wouldn't be on the other side of it. But the house was sitting empty and the property taxes were coming and my husband Greg was being patient but he kept gently saying, "Lin, we should probably get up there." So that Thursday I drove up alone. Greg offered to come but I needed to do the first pass by myself. I needed to walk through that house one time without anybody watching me. I started in the bedroom because I thought it would be the hardest and I wanted to get it over with. It wasn't the hardest. The bedroom was easy because she'd already mostly packed it up herself in the last year of her life. She'd given things away. She'd labeled boxes. There was a sticky note on the dresser that said "Linda's grandmother's brooch is in the blue jewelry box on top." She'd been ready. The hard part was the kitchen. The kitchen was where my mother lived. The bedroom was where she slept but the kitchen was where she was alive. And the kitchen still smelled like her. Like coffee and the lemon dish soap she used and something else underneath, something I couldn't quite place at first, kind of warm and earthy and a little sharp. I started with the upper cabinets. Most of it was junk, mismatched mugs and 30 year old Tupperware and a set of measuring cups I remember her using to bake my birthday cakes. I made a pile to keep and a pile to donate and a pile to throw out. Then I opened the pantry. The pantry was a tall narrow cabinet next to the refrigerator with one of those accordion doors that never closed quite right. My mother had organized it in a way that only made sense to her. Cans on the bottom, baking stuff in the middle, weird stuff on top. The weird stuff was where I found it. A quart sized mason jar, the kind with the metal ring and the flat lid, full almost to the top with a cloudy yellowish brine. Floating inside were what looked like dozens and dozens of peeled garlic cloves. Some whole, some halved. The label was a strip of masking tape with her handwriting on it in faded blue pen. "Made 9/4. Eat 2 with breakfast every day." I held the jar in both hands and I stared at it. And then I remembered. I remembered being 7 years old at the kitchen table eating Cheerios and watching my mother fish two cloves of pickled garlic out of a jar with a fork and eat them like candy. I remembered being 12 and rolling my eyes when she did it. I remembered being 16 and telling her it was disgusting and her saying, "Linda Marie, my mother did this, and her mother did this, and you will be glad of it one day." I remembered the smell now. The thing underneath the coffee and the lemon dish soap. It was garlic. The whole house smelled faintly like garlic and I'd never noticed it because it had always smelled like that. For my entire 58 years on this earth, my mother's kitchen had smelled like garlic, because every single morning of every single day of my mother's adult life, she had eaten 2 cloves of pickled garlic with her breakfast. She started doing it when she was probably 20 years old. She did it until the day she died at 91. That is 71 years. 71 years of 2 cloves a day. I sat down on the kitchen floor with the jar in my lap and I started crying. Because I am 58 years old and I am on FOUR prescriptions. Lisinopril for my blood pressure. Metformin because my A1C crept up to 6.3 two years ago. Atorvastatin because my cholesterol was "a little high." And a low dose of Zoloft because somewhere around my 55th birthday I started feeling like a fog was settling over my brain and I couldn't shake it and my doctor said it sounded like depression and put me on something for it. I am tired all the time. I get a sinus infection twice a year that takes 3 weeks to clear. I had bronchitis in December that lingered until February. I sleep 8 hours and wake up feeling like I slept 4. I forget words mid sentence. I lost my keys 3 times last week and one of those times they were in my hand. My mother at 58 was teaching a Sunday school class of 9 year olds, running the church rummage sale, gardening, walking 2 miles a day, and not on a single pill. My mother at 88 was driving herself to the grocery store. My mother at 91 had a medicine cabinet a hospice nurse had never seen. And the only thing I could think, sitting on her kitchen floor with that jar in my lap, was that I had spent my entire adult life ignoring a thing I'd watched her do every morning of my childhood. A thing her mother had done. A thing her mother's mother had done. A thing that came from a country I'd never been to where people had been doing it for 5,000 years. I had watched my mother do something every single day and I had thought it was weird and I had never once asked her why. I sat on that floor for a long time. Then I called my brother Doug. "Doug. Did Mom ever talk to you about the garlic." "What garlic." "The pickled garlic. The jar she kept. She ate two cloves every morning." "Oh. Yeah. She tried to get me to do it when I was a kid. I said no." "Did she ever say why she did it." He was quiet for a minute. Then he said, "She said her mother told her it kept the body strong. That was it. She said her mother told her you eat two cloves a day and your body knows what to do." I sat with that. "Doug. Mom was 91 with no prescriptions." "I know, Lin." "I'm 58 with four." He didn't say anything. "Doug. I think I'm going to start eating the garlic." "Don't eat the garlic in that jar, Linda. It's been in there since September." That made me laugh for the first time all day. I drove home that night with the jar in the passenger seat. I didn't eat any of it, Doug was right, that brine had been sitting in a pantry for 6 months. But I put the jar on my own kitchen counter at home and I started reading. I read for about a week. Off and on, late at night, after Greg went to bed. I am not a research person. I am a retired elementary school librarian and I'd rather read a novel than a medical article any day of the week. But I needed to understand what my mother had been doing for 71 years that the rest of us hadn't been doing. And what I learned cracked something open in me that I'm still trying to put into words. It comes down to a compound called allicin. Allicin is what gives raw, crushed garlic its sharp smell. It's a sulfur compound and it's only released when the garlic is crushed or chopped or chewed. Whole, uncrushed garlic doesn't have it. Cooked garlic mostly doesn't have it either, because heat destroys it within minutes. The garlic in the spaghetti sauce I make every Sunday? Mostly dead by the time it hits the plate. The garlic powder in my spice rack? Forget it. The pre minced garlic in the jar in my fridge? That stuff has been sitting in oil and citric acid for who knows how long. Most of the allicin is gone before I ever twist the lid off. The only way to get real, meaningful, daily allicin into your body, the way my mother was getting it, is from fresh raw garlic that's been crushed and eaten within minutes. Or pickled, the way she did it, in a brine that preserves the compound instead of destroying it. And that allicin, day after day after day for 71 years, was doing something in her body that nothing in my body has been doing. Here's what I learned about why. Your immune system has front line defenders. Cells that patrol your body constantly looking for invaders. When those defenders are active and well supplied, they catch bugs the moment they enter you, before you ever feel sick. Before the cough, before the congestion, before the fog. The bug never gets a foothold because the defenders shut it down at the door. When those defenders are sluggish, bugs slip past. You get sick. And you stay sick. And when you finally do recover, your defenders are even more depleted than before, so the next bug hits you harder, and you stay sick longer, and the cycle keeps going. What the defenders rely on, what they need to stay sharp, is a steady stream of specific signals from food. Sulfur rich signals. The kind that pungent, sharp, alive foods used to deliver in every meal back when people were eating the way my mother's mother ate. Modern food has lost almost all of that. We've bred the bitterness and the bite out of our vegetables. We cook everything to death. We buy our garlic from a bin at Meijer that's been sitting under fluorescent lights for 6 weeks. We use the powder. We use the jar. We have basically eliminated, over a few generations, the steady daily signal our immune system was designed to receive. So our defenders sit at the door half asleep. Bugs walk past. We get sick. And we blame it on age, or stress, or "going around at work," when actually our body has been missing a signal for years. My mother's body got that signal every morning at the kitchen table. For 71 years. I read that and I thought about her 41 year medicine cabinet and I thought about my own bathroom cabinet with 4 orange bottles in it and I thought about the way she walked herself out to the mailbox on the morning of her 91st birthday and waved at the mail carrier like it was nothing. It wasn't nothing. It was 71 years of 2 cloves a day. It was a signal her body had been getting since 1953 that mine had been missing since I refused to eat one at age 7. I needed to start. But here's the thing, I am a 58 year old woman who works part time at the township library, who has lunch with her friends every Thursday at the Olive Garden on Saginaw Highway, who babysits her grandson 2 afternoons a week. I cannot, under any circumstances, smell like raw garlic. I cannot have garlic breath. I cannot be the grandma who shows up to my grandson's preschool pickup smelling like a pizza parlor. That ruled out raw cloves. That ruled out my mother's jar, even if I made a fresh batch. So I kept reading. And I came across a company called Alevia. Alevia makes a garlic extract supplement. 2 capsules, once a day with breakfast, the same way my mother ate her 2 cloves. The capsules are standardized so you get a meaningful, consistent dose of allicin every single morning, the same compound my mother was eating since the Eisenhower administration. And the thing that sold me, the thing that actually made me click order, was that it's odorless. No garlic breath. No body odor. Nothing. You take the capsules with your coffee, you go to your library shift, you go to Olive Garden with your friends, you go pick up your grandson, and nobody knows. The bottle arrived on a Tuesday. I started that morning. I'd love to tell you the heavens parted on day 3. They didn't. The first 2 weeks I didn't feel anything different at all and I'll be honest, I almost stopped. I almost decided this was just me trying to chase my dead mother through a bottle of pills. But I kept going. Because the bottle itself said it can take 2 to 4 weeks for the body to feel like it's getting consistent support, and because I had committed to giving this 90 days, the full money back window, before I made any decision. Around week 3, I noticed I'd stopped clearing my throat in the mornings. I hadn't realized I'd been doing it. I'd been waking up with a kind of low grade gunkiness in my chest for probably 4 or 5 years and I'd never thought about it because it was just how I woke up. And one Tuesday morning I was making coffee and I realized I hadn't done it. Not that morning, not the morning before, not the morning before that. Week 4, my husband Greg said, "You seem more like yourself." I said, "What do you mean." He said, "I don't know. You've just been more here." Week 6, I went to my granddaughter's school musical. I sat in a stuffy elementary school auditorium for 90 minutes with 200 coughing kids and 200 sniffling parents. Three of my friends from that group got sick the following week. I didn't. Week 8, I went in for my quarterly blood work. My A1C had come down from 6.3 to 5.9, which my doctor said was excellent. My blood pressure was the lowest it had been in 4 years. He asked me what I was doing differently and I told him I'd been taking a garlic supplement. He paused. He looked at his notes. He said, "Well. Whatever you're doing, keep doing it." That was 7 months ago. I'm still on my prescriptions because I am not a doctor and I am not going off anything without my doctor's blessing. But my doctor and I have started having actual conversations about possibly tapering the Zoloft because I told him the fog has been lifting, slowly, for months. I told him I forget words less. I told him I sleep through the night and I wake up feeling like I actually slept. I told him I think my body is getting a signal it's been missing for 50 years. He didn't laugh. He looked thoughtful. He said, "There's actually decent research on garlic. Keep doing what you're doing." I think about my mother every day. I think about her sitting at that kitchen table at age 22 in 1957, fishing 2 cloves out of a jar her own mother had made for her, with no idea that 68 years later her daughter would find her empty jar in a pantry and finally understand. I think about the fact that she never lectured me about it. Never made me feel guilty for refusing. Never said "you'll regret this." She just did it. Every day. For 71 years. And trusted that one day I might figure it out. I figured it out at 58. On a Thursday in March. On a kitchen floor. I sold my mother's house in May. The new owners were a young couple expecting their first baby. I left them most of the appliances and a few pieces of furniture and a casserole dish that had been in the family since my grandmother. I kept the jar. It's sitting on my kitchen counter right now, empty, washed out, the masking tape label still on the side in her faded blue handwriting. "Made 9/4. Eat 2 with breakfast every day." I do, Mom. Finally. I do. If you're reading this and you've spent your whole life watching the people in your family get older and you're starting to feel the same things creeping in, the tiredness, the fog, the prescriptions stacking up on the bathroom counter, the colds that won't quit, I want you to know something. There might be a signal your body has been missing too. One your great great grandmother got every single day and you almost certainly haven't had a meaningful dose of in 30 years. Alevia Garlic Extract. 2 capsules with breakfast. The same compound my mother ate at her kitchen table for 71 years, standardized into a capsule that doesn't make you smell like anything. No garlic breath. No body odor. Just the signal, every morning, the way it was supposed to be. A bottle is a month's supply. The 90 day money back guarantee means you have a full 3 months to find out if your body responds. If it doesn't work for you, ship the bottle back and they refund every penny. You're risking nothing except the time it takes to find out. I wish I'd started at 22 like my mother. I wish I'd started at 7 when she first held a fork out to me. I didn't. I started at 58 on a kitchen floor with her empty jar in my lap. It's not too late. It wasn't for me. It probably isn't for you. 👉 alevia.com/garlic/7 P.S. The thing that haunts me, the thing I'll probably think about for the rest of my life, is that my mother never once said the word allicin. She didn't know the science. She didn't know about sulfur compounds or front line immune defenders or any of it. She just knew her mother had told her, and her mother's mother had told her, and somewhere back in a village she never saw, somebody figured out 2 cloves a day kept the body strong. She trusted it. For 71 years. She was right. P.P.S. If you have a mother or a grandmother or an aunt who lived a long, healthy, prescription light life, I want you to think about what they did every day that you don't. There is almost always something. A walk. A glass of water in the morning. A daily ritual. A bowl of soup. A clove of garlic. The wisdom was in the daily, not the dramatic. We've lost most of it. Some of it is still findable. P.P.P.S. The 90 day guarantee was the reason I let myself try this without feeling silly about it. I'm a 58 year old woman with 4 prescriptions and a dead mother. I am not the target market for snake oil. But 90 days to find out is a fair deal, and if I'd shipped the bottle back I'd have been out nothing. I'm 7 months in now and I'm on my 7th bottle. My mother's jar is still on my counter. 👉 alevia.com/garlic/7