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My son told me I couldn't see Maren anymore. Not in those words. He's too kind for those words. But that's what it was. He stood in my kitchen on a Sunday in February with his coat still on and his keys still in his hand and he said, "Mom. Every time she comes over here she gets sick. And then Hannah gets sick. And then I get sick. And I'm missing work. We have to figure something out." I was holding a wooden spoon and stirring nothing in a pot of cold soup because I needed my hands to be doing something. I said, "What do you mean figure something out." He said, "Maybe we just keep visits short for a while. Maybe outside, when it warms up. Maybe we just give it some time." Some time. I'm 57 years old and I have one granddaughter and she is 8 and her name is Maren and I have not been allowed to keep her overnight since October. That's the part nobody tells you about getting older. It's not the wrinkles. It's not the joints. It's the slow, polite, well-meaning way the people you love start moving you to the edge of their lives. Like a chair nobody sits in anymore but nobody wants to throw out. My name is Charlene. I live in Wilmington, North Carolina, in a small brick ranch that my husband Earl and I bought in 1994. Earl passed in 2018. Pancreatic. Eleven months from diagnosis to the funeral. I have one child. His name is Brandon. He is 32. He's an electrical engineer at the port and he married a sweet, careful, anxious woman named Hannah who keeps an air purifier in every room of their house and makes Maren wash her hands the second she walks in the door. Hannah is not the villain of this story. I want to say that right now. Hannah is a good mother. She is doing what good mothers do, which is protect her child, even from her child's grandmother, if that's what the evidence in front of her says she should do. And the evidence in front of her was this. Maren came to my house in June. Caught a stomach bug. Maren came to my house in August. Caught a head cold. Maren came to my house for Halloween. Caught the flu, missed a week of school, gave it to Hannah, who missed a week of work. Three for three. By Thanksgiving, I was being asked, very gently, if maybe I could come to their house instead. By Christmas, I was being asked, very gently, if maybe Maren shouldn't sleep over until "we figure out what's going on." By February, my son was standing in my kitchen with his coat on. I want you to understand something. I bleached my house. I'm not being dramatic. I went through that ranch with rubber gloves and a five gallon bucket of cleaner and I scrubbed the baseboards. I scrubbed the inside of the refrigerator. I scrubbed the grout in the bathroom on my hands and knees. I took out the area rugs in the living room and the bedroom and put them on the curb. I tossed throw pillows that had been on the couch since Earl was alive. I bought a new mattress for the guest room. Not a new mattress cover. A new mattress. $740 at the Mattress Firm on Oleander Drive. I bought one of those air purifiers Hannah has. The expensive one with the blue light. I plugged it in next to the couch and ran it 24 hours a day. I stopped using the dish sponge. I started using paper towels. I bought new dish towels every two weeks. I switched laundry detergent to the kind that's supposed to be gentle on kids. Maren came over in January for an afternoon visit. Three hours. We made cookies. She went home. Two days later Brandon texted me. "Maren has a fever. 102." I sat on my couch in my freshly cleaned house with my freshly scrubbed baseboards and my purified air and I cried until I couldn't breathe. Here's what I haven't told you yet. I had been sick for years. Not in any way I would have told you about if you'd asked me how I was doing. I would have said fine. Tired. You know, my age. The usual. But the truth, if I'd been honest with you, was this. I had been waking up at 3:47 in the morning for as long as I could remember. Not 3 in the morning. Not 4. 3:47. Earl used to laugh about it. He'd say, "Char, you got an alarm clock in your head that nobody can turn off." My stomach had been bloated for so long I'd stopped noticing it. I had a closet of pants in two sizes. The ones I could button in the morning. The ones I had to wear by 2 PM. I assumed every woman over 50 had a 2 PM closet. I was tired in a way that sleep didn't fix. I'd sleep 9 hours and wake up feeling like I'd slept 4. My doctor at the time, a nice young man named Dr. Patel, told me my bloodwork was fine and that this was "normal for women in your stage of life." That sentence. Your stage of life. Like I was a play that was almost over. I had sugar cravings that came on at exactly the same time every afternoon. Around 4 PM. I'd be sitting at the kitchen table doing the crossword and suddenly I'd need something sweet so badly I'd be in my car driving to the Walgreens for a bag of those orange circus peanuts that nobody actually likes. My skin had gone puffy around the eyes. My hair had thinned. My memory had gotten foggy in a way I blamed on Earl dying. I told myself this was all grief. I told myself this was all 57. I told myself this was all just what happens. I had no idea that everything I'd been feeling and everything that was happening with Maren were the same story. *** The turning point was my sister. Her name is Roxanne. She is 61, two years older than me, lives in Greensboro, drives a Ford Edge, and has four grandchildren who treat her house like it's Disney World. Two of them sleep over there every other weekend. None of them have ever caught anything at her house. Ever. She came down for a visit the first weekend of March. Stayed three nights. Drank coffee with me at my kitchen table and listened to me cry about Maren. She let me cry the whole way through. She didn't interrupt. She didn't try to fix it. She just sat there and put her hand on top of mine on the table and let me get it all out. When I was done she said, "Char. Can I tell you something? And you can be mad at me if you want." I said okay. She said, "I don't think it's your house." I said, "What do you mean it's not my house." She said, "I think it's you." I pulled my hand away. She put hers back on top of mine. She said, "Listen. Hear me out. When Maren comes over, she's spending the whole day with you. Breathing what you breathe. Drinking out of glasses you washed. Eating food you made. Hugging you. Sitting in your lap. And if something is off in you, in your body, in your gut, in whatever you're carrying around, that's the air she's in for 8 hours." I just stared at her. She said, "How long have you been waking up at 3:47?" I started to answer and then I stopped. She said, "How long have you been bloated by 2 PM every day? How long have you needed something sweet at 4 in the afternoon? How long has your hair been thinning? How long have you been so tired sleep doesn't touch it?" I couldn't answer her. She said, "Char. I had all of that. I had every single thing on that list. And it wasn't grief. It wasn't 50. It wasn't my hormones. It was something living in me that I didn't know was there." I want to slow down here because this is the moment that changed everything. Roxanne told me that 2 years ago her daughter, my niece Tessa, who's a nurse practitioner up in Charlottesville, had sat her down and told her about something Roxanne had never thought about in her entire life. Tessa told her that most people, most adults, most regular hardworking Americans who eat sushi and drink tap water and pet dogs and walk barefoot on grass and eat at restaurants, are carrying things in their gut they don't know they have. Picked up years ago. Sometimes decades ago. From a salad at a wedding. From a vacation. From a kiss with someone who'd just kissed someone else. From a glass of water at a restaurant in Mexico in 1997. Roxanne said, "Tessa told me they're not the way you picture them. They're not big things. Most of them are tiny. Some of them are microscopic. And they don't just sit there. They build a layer around themselves. Like a slime. A film. A coating that hides them from your immune system." She said, "Tessa called it a biofilm. She said it's like a fort. The thing is inside the fort. Your immune system walks past the fort and doesn't see what's behind the wall." Roxanne said, "And while they're hiding behind that wall, they're taking from you. They're taking the nutrients from your food before your body absorbs them. That's why you can eat a good breakfast and still be tired at 10 AM. They're putting out byproducts that mess with the signals between your gut and your brain. That's why you wake up at 3:47. That's why you crave sugar at 4 PM. They're stealing from you and you don't even know it." She said, "Char. They were in me. I had no idea." I asked her what she did about it. She said, "Tessa told me there's one thing that's been studied for a long time, since before there were doctors, that's actually been shown to interact with that slime layer. Most things wash right past it. This one doesn't." She paused. She said, "Garlic." I want to be honest with you. My first reaction was to laugh. Garlic. Like, the thing in the spaghetti sauce. I said, "Roxanne. I cook with garlic every Sunday. I make my Bolognese with six cloves of it. If garlic was the answer I'd be 30 years old and bench pressing the Buick." She smiled. She said, "That's what I said too. And Tessa explained it to me and now I'm going to explain it to you. Sit down." I was already sitting down. She said, "When you cook garlic, you destroy the part that actually does anything. The compound in garlic that interacts with that slime layer is called allicin. Allicin is a tiny, reactive sulfur molecule. It's powerful but it's fragile. Heat destroys it. Stomach acid destroys most of it before it gets where it needs to go. The dried powder in your spice rack has almost none of it. The fresh cloves from the grocery store have some, but by the time it gets through your stomach, what's left is a drop." She said, "The way the people who studied this for thousands of years took it, the way it was eaten in Central Asia for 5,000 years, was raw, every day, multiple times a day. That's how it got in their system enough to do anything." She said, "We don't do that. Nobody you know is chewing raw garlic cloves at breakfast. Even if you wanted to, your breath would clear a room and your stomach would burn. So most people get almost none of what's actually in garlic that matters." She pulled a small white bottle out of her purse. Set it on the kitchen table. She said, "This is what I take. Tessa got it for me. It's a garlic extract. It's the part of the garlic that actually does the work, concentrated into a capsule, made so your stomach acid doesn't destroy it before it gets to where it needs to go. And here's the part that mattered to me. It's odorless. No garlic breath. No garlic body smell. Nothing." I picked up the bottle. The label said Alevia. I said, "Roxanne." She said, "Just take it for a month. Just see." I want to tell you what Tessa explained to my sister, because once I heard it the way Tessa explained it, I couldn't unhear it. Your body has a built-in system for dealing with things that aren't supposed to be there. White blood cells. Stomach acid. Lining in your gut that keeps things separated. It's a whole defense network. And it works pretty well against fresh threats. The stomach bug you catch at a barbecue. The cold your grandkid brings home. Stuff that comes in and your body sees it and addresses it. But the things that have been inside you a long time, they've adapted. They've learned. They build that protective coating around themselves and they sit just under the radar. Your immune system doesn't ignore them on purpose. It just can't see them through the wall. What allicin has been studied for, what makes it different from a lot of other natural compounds, is that it's small and reactive enough to interact with that wall. To help support the body's ability to break it down. So the things hiding behind it stop being hidden. And when they stop being hidden, your body finally gets to do what it's been trying to do for years. The bloating eases. Because nothing is sitting in your gut taking what isn't supposed to be taken. The 3 AM wake-ups settle. Because whatever was disrupting the signals between your gut and your brain isn't disrupting them anymore. The sugar cravings calm down. Because whatever was sending those signals doesn't have a megaphone anymore. The fog lifts. Your skin starts looking like your skin again. Your hair starts behaving. You wake up at 6:30 and you feel like you slept. And here is what nobody told me, what I had to figure out on my own, with Maren. When that stuff isn't sitting in you anymore, you stop carrying it around. You stop breathing it out into your house. You stop putting your hands on things and leaving traces of it. The grandkid who used to walk into your house and catch everything starts walking into your house and not catching anything. Because the air in your house is just air again. The water in your house is just water again. The grandmother in your house is just a grandmother again. I started taking Alevia's Garlic two capsules a day, with breakfast, like Roxanne told me to. The first thing I noticed, honestly, was nothing. I'm not going to lie to you. The first three days I waited to feel something and I didn't and I almost gave up. Then on day 6 or day 7, something weird happened. I slept until 6:14 in the morning. Not 3:47. 6:14. I lay in bed when I woke up and I thought, did I dream the alarm clock. Day 9 I made spaghetti for dinner and I sat down to eat and halfway through I realized I'd buttoned my pants in the morning and they were still buttoned. I hadn't unbuttoned them at 2 PM. I hadn't even thought about it. They just stayed buttoned. Day 14 was a Thursday. I was at the kitchen table doing a crossword puzzle. It was 4 PM. I waited for the sugar craving. The orange circus peanuts pull. The Walgreens run. It didn't come. I sat there with my pencil in my hand and I waited and it didn't come. I made myself a cup of tea instead and I felt fine. Week 3 my hair stylist asked me what I was doing differently. She lifted a handful of my hair at the back of my head and she said, "Char. This is thicker than it was in November. What did you start using." I told her. I told her about the bottle. She wrote it down on the back of a Walgreens receipt. Week 4 my reflection in the window of the Harris Teeter on Oleander stopped me. I didn't recognize the woman for half a second. The puffiness around her eyes was gone. The skin on her face looked tighter and more like skin. She looked, I don't know how else to say it, like she was inside her face instead of behind it. I'd been behind my face for years and I hadn't even known I was hiding. I want to tell you about the objections I had, because I had every objection you're having right now. I had tried supplements before. The fish oil. The probiotic that promised to fix my gut and didn't. The multivitamin that turned my pee yellow and did nothing else. The collagen powder. I had a whole cabinet of bottles like a graveyard of hope. And I knew, sitting at that kitchen table with my sister, that another bottle wasn't going to be the answer. Except this one wasn't trying to do what those did. Those were giving my body more of something. Vitamins. Minerals. Building blocks. They were feeding a body that wasn't absorbing them because there was something in the way. This one was about what was in the way. That's a completely different thing. I thought, if this worked, my doctor would have told me. And then I thought about how my doctor had told me my bloodwork was fine. My doctor had told me this was just my stage of life. My doctor had told me to drink more water and exercise more. My doctor had a 12 minute appointment slot for me and he had filled out his form and he had moved on to the next patient and he had not once asked me if I was waking up at 3:47 in the morning or what I thought about that. Doctors do their best. I love Dr. Patel. But Dr. Patel was not going to find this for me. I thought, garlic, won't I smell. I asked Roxanne about that the first night and she lifted her arm and stuck her armpit at me like a teenager and said, smell. She smelled like a normal woman. Like a person who'd been driving for four hours and needed a shower. I thought, this is too simple. A vegetable. A vegetable that's been on every kitchen counter in human history. A vegetable that we put in pasta sauce and salad dressing. How could the answer to something I've been dealing with for 7 years be a vegetable. And the answer to that is, it wasn't the vegetable. It was the part of the vegetable. The part you can't get from the vegetable anymore because of the way we eat it. The part that has been studied, that has thousands of years of people taking it every day, that has decades of modern research looking at exactly what it does inside the human body. The vegetable wasn't the answer. The vegetable was the wrapping. What's inside is the answer. I want to tell you about Maren. The first Saturday of May, Hannah called me. She said, "Mom. Brandon and I are going to a wedding in Charleston Memorial Day weekend. We can't take Maren. Would you keep her." I had to sit down. I said, "Are you sure." She said, "Charlene. You sound different on the phone lately. You sound like yourself again. I don't know what's going on but I trust you. Yes. We're sure." Maren came on Friday afternoon. Hannah dropped her off at 4:15. She had her little pink rolling suitcase and a backpack with a unicorn on it and she ran up the walk and into my arms and I picked her up and she put her face in my neck and I smelled her hair and she smelled like Hannah's lavender shampoo. She stayed three nights. We made cookies on Saturday morning. We went to the beach on Saturday afternoon. We watched a movie Saturday night. We went to the farmer's market on Sunday morning. She slept in the guest room with the new mattress. I made her pancakes Sunday morning with chocolate chips in the shape of a smiley face. She went home Sunday afternoon. Monday went by. Tuesday went by. Wednesday went by. Thursday I got a text from Brandon. "Hey Mom. Just checking in. Maren's good. School's good. No issues. Hope you're well." That was it. No fever. No cough. No call from the school nurse. Nothing. I sat in Earl's old chair in the living room with my phone in my hand and I cried the kind of crying you do when something you thought was gone comes back. Quiet crying. The kind nobody hears. It's been 6 months now. Maren has been over 11 times. She's slept over 4 times. She has not caught a single thing at my house since I started taking Alevia. I am not telling you this because I think garlic is a miracle. I'm telling you this because I think garlic is exactly what people have been telling us it was for 5,000 years and we forgot. We started cooking it. We started powdering it. We started buying it dead in plastic jars and shaking it on pizza. The thing that actually mattered about it disappeared from our diets and we got slowly more tired and slowly more bloated and slowly more foggy and slowly more sick and we blamed our age. Here's what I want you to know about Alevia, and then I'm done. It's an odorless garlic extract. That word odorless was the part that got me. I cannot have garlic breath. I'm 57. I work part time at a doctor's office. I can't walk in smelling like a Sicilian kitchen. The capsules are made to deliver the allicin to where it needs to go without your stomach acid destroying it on the way. There are 60 capsules in a bottle. You take 2 a day. One bottle lasts a month. It's made in the USA. They ship it from the USA. The company is called Alevia and they put a 90 day money back guarantee on it. If you take it for 60 days and you don't feel different, you ship the bottle back and they refund you. That's how confident they are. I'm telling you. If you've been waking up at 3 in the morning. If you've been bloated by 2 PM. If you've been tired in a way sleep doesn't touch. If you've been craving sugar at 4. If your grandkid keeps catching things at your house and you can't figure out why. You might not be old. You might not be falling apart. You might just be carrying something you didn't know you were carrying. P.S. The guarantee is real. I asked Roxanne about it before I ordered because I wasn't going to risk $50 on a maybe. You order the bottle. You take it. If after 60 days you don't feel like a different woman, you put what's left in a padded envelope and send it back to them and they refund every cent. 90 days from when you got it. That's the window. They want the bottle back, they want to see you tried it, and if it didn't do anything for you, you get your money back. I have never had to use it. I bought a second bottle for my sister to give to her friend. P.P.S. If you're a grandmother and you've been moved to the edge of your grandbabies' lives, I want you to know I see you. I sat in my kitchen and cried over a wooden spoon and thought I was going to lose her. Maren slept in the guest room last weekend and asked me if she could stay another night. Don't give up on yourself. There might be something you don't know is happening in there. And the thing that fixes it might be sitting on a shelf in a small white bottle. P.P.P.S. Don't wait until cold and flu season. The reason this matters now, in May, in June, in the middle of summer, is that it takes a little while to work. The way Roxanne explained it to me, you can't crash diet your way out of something that's been building for 7 years. You start now. You give your body the support it's been missing. By the time fall hits and the school year starts and the daycares fill up with sniffles and your grandbabies come to visit, you're already in a different place. Don't wait until October. By October it's too late to start. Start in May. 👉 alevia.com/garlic/7