Chris Kresser: I think I answered at least one question about that in a previous Q&A and pretty soon we’re going to have a searchable database of the transcripts from the Q&As, so you’ll be able to go to this database and type in “PPI Barrett’s” and it will pull up any answers for questions that have involved those search terms. So that’s going to be really cool so you don’t have to just like wade through every Q&A. I’ve got to get a status report on that from AJ, but I think it’s coming in the near future. It’ll certainly be available while you guys are still in the course.
So just to give you the brief summary, with Barrett’s, of course, you need to be careful. What we do is all the other things that we talked about doing for acid reflux and GERD, and if the patient gets much better symptomatically and they decide that they want to give this a shot they gradually titrate off of their PPIs. If they start noticing significant reflux again, then they may need to go back on them. But if they don’t notice any reflux, then what I suggest is they get endoscopy so that they can check out what’s happening in the esophagus and make sure that there’s not a continued progression of the disease. Maybe they would do that after about three to six months and then they do it in another three to six months and they check in, not too often because it’s an invasive procedure, but enough to make sure that there’s no progression of the disease. In many cases where I’ve had patients do that, there hasn’t been progression and there’s actually even been regression in a couple of situations that come to mind. But I think you need to urge them to do that, and it’s especially important in people who have silent reflux because they’re not going to gauge what’s happening just on the basis of symptoms.
So this is one from Justine. I’m just going to shorten it. The question is about using garlic supplements for blood pressure which we talked in the exposome unit where we discussed nutritional interventions for blood pressure. Justine asks, knowing that crushing garlic … this is from my interview with Jo Robinson about how to prepare foods to increase their nutrient density, and we talked about in that interview that if you crush garlic and let it rest, or mince it and let it rest for 10 minutes before you cook with it, that crushing is what releases the allicin and that’s the active compound, or one of them, in garlic. Plants have their own defense systems and allicin is part of that defense system. So if you crush garlic, it releases the allicin and if you let it sit for 10 minutes before you add it, it dramatically increases the allicin content.