garlic facts

S

spamreefnew

New member
hi all , i was just reading some threds on garlic,and was wondering if anybody has found any science facts about it yet? i once used garlic in my main display to treat 2 clowns,chromis,and 1 royal gramma. the only fish that did not become 100% healthy was the royal gramma. this was the fish that refused to eat the garlic. this was about 2 onths ago. is the ich still lurking in my sand? did i just get lucky? or did the garlic realy make the fishes blood taste like crap causing the ich to die off?
 
in my experience the clown and the damsels specially chromis are more resistant for the ich using at least garlic in the food and the royal gramma seems like the garlic and hiposalinity, metronidazol, etc doesnt work with him at all!
in this case if i were you, i 'll change the royal gramma to a quarentine and feed with his favorite food (i dont know what food the royal prefer, you must to know) mine prefered pellets by spectrum.)
and madicate with cupramine
or keep the royal in the display and watch how he die!
the refusing to eat by the gramma is the worst sign!
 
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Well, there are no "facts" with garlic, only anecdotal evidence which is: fish seem to like the taste/smell
 
everything im reading is that a healthy fish will resist ick (some better than others) and an unhealthy fish will succomb to it,

so garlic may have no medicinal value other than getting the fish to eat there by keeping it healthey

not facts just speculation based on what ive read
 
still no real PROOF that garlic works and still no PROOF that it does NOT work. i wish i had the time and money to set up some side by side hospital tanks and try it for myself.
 
Re: garlic facts

<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=14082952#post14082952 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by spamreefnew
hi all , i was just reading some threds on garlic,and was wondering if anybody has found any science facts about it yet?
Click to expand...
I don't know of any scientific studies on the efficacy of garlic in curing anything as far as marine fish, or even freshwater fish, are concerned.

There are scientific papers on the beneficial effects of the primary ingredient in garlic for certain human conditions. I believe I posted those several years ago but I can't seem to find them now.

The only thing we have as far as the effect of garlic on marine fishes is concerned are anecdotal reports.

I can tell you my experience with it and you can file it away in the for what it's worth box. I make no claims whatsoever, I'm just relaying what I observed in my own tank.

I purchased a coral beauty angelfish (Centropyge bispinosa) and added it to my 120-gal tank that already had three fairy wrasses (two Cirrhilabrus scottorum and one C. lineatus), an orchid dottyback (Pseudochromis fridmani) and a foxface rabbitfish (Siganus vulpinus). About three days later I noticed ich on the coral beauty and the foxface rabbitfish -- no more than two or three visible trophonts on each fish.

I immediately added about a half teaspoon of very finely minced fresh garlic to the food and let that soak for fifteen minutes before feeding it to the tank. I was surprised that the fish seemed to like the tiny pieces of garlic. They all ate it just as if it were regular fish food. I continued to add a small amount of freshly minced garlic to my twice-daily feedings.

A day or two after noticing ich on the coral beauty and the foxface rabbitfish, I noticed a few trophonts on all three fairy wrasses. By this time there were probably five or six trophonts visible on the coral beauty and the foxface. The orchid dottyback never did show any signs of ich.

The worst that the ich ever got was about six or seven visible trophonts on each of the fish that were infected. I continued to feed freshly minced garlic twice a day for three weeks. After about the first week, there were no visible signs of ich on any of the fish. I continued feeding garlic for another two weeks and then stopped.

About a week after I stopped feeding the garlic, I noticed three or four trophonts on one or two fish. I immediately resumed feeding finely minced garlic but this time it was three times a day. The visible trophonts disappeared in a couple of days but I continued feeding freshly minced garlic three times a day for five or six weeks, then I stopped.

There were no signs of ich in my tank after that. I sold the tank some two years later when I had to move. I did not add any new fish to my tank after the coral beauty.

There are all sorts of explanations for what I observed. It could be that the garlic had no effect in spite of my observations. Maybe it was just a coincidence.

It could be that the trophonts don't like the smell of garlic. It could be that all that garlic in the tankwater caused the theronts to become disoriented and make it more difficult for them to find a fish to attach to. Maybe the garlic interfered with the tomont's ability to encyst properly.

Maybe the garlic actually helped the fishes' immune systems resist the parasite. Maybe the garlic gave the fish bad breath and the theronts kept their distance.

Maybe I should have used a quarantine tank in the first place.

:)

P.S. -- Points to remember about my experience: the ich was never really a bad infestation. I used only freshly minced garlic that I chopped up myself just before adding it to a 1/4 cup of tankwater with the fish food (various frozen Ocean Nutrition products). I began feeding garlic immediately upon first sight of any trophonts. I fed the freshly minced garlic three times a day for a long period of time, at least five weeks after the disappearance of the last trophonts.

I don't recommend garlic. I'm just saying that I used it and that's what happened.
 
Short story but similar to Ninong.

I have a maroon clown that gets some type of fin decay. It has happened several times and each time feeding garlic has reversed the condition within days. He eats just fine no matter what, and I have let it go a few times thinking it will reverse itself. Once I feed the garlic, things get better quickly. It may be 100% coincidence, but I am sold even if it is nonsense and now feed garlic laced foods (Spectrum A+ for example) and have not seen the problem recur.
 
hmm good job! but if you are adding garlic everyday you need to have a good skimmer if not the algaes becomes a problem for the nutrients!
 
Having observed what appeared to be a positive correlation between adding freshly minced garlic to the fishes' diet and the disappearance of visible signs of Cryptocaryon irritans trophonts, I searched the medical literature to see if there was any possible explanation for this based on studies that have been done on the effects of garlic on human health. I posted the following a few years ago in another thread. Most of it is copied verbatim from the online source.

I think that if you are going to feed garlic to your fish, it is better to use fresh garlic cloves that you yourself finely mince or crush just prior to feeding.

A few years back Horge wrote a nice article on the possible benefits to be obtained by feeding garlic. He pointed out that the active ingredient in garlic is allicin. He also mentioned that freshly minced garlic cloves would be more effective than garlic extract or commercially available chopped or crushed garlic in a jar. I believe he said that this was because of the short "shelf life" of allicin, if I remember correctly. He also pointed out that the fish would have to consume a large quantity of the garlic to ingest a sufficient dosage of allicin to be therapeutically significant.

Anyway, a couple of years after reading that article, I successfully fought off an outbreak of ich in my aquarium by feeding the fish freshly minced garlic three times a day for about five or six weeks straight. I used fresh garlic cloves that I chopped over and over again until they were practically mush. My ich was imported on a Coral Beauty Angelfish (Centropyge bispinosa) that I thought was ich-free when I purchased it. Since I had only five relatively small fish in my aquarium at the time, I fed only about 1/4 tsp of finely minced garlic three times a day.

Since then I have done additional research on garlic to see if I could find anything to explain it's effect. I was about to say to support Horge's claims but he didn't actually make any claims as such. In fact, he was careful to point out that no scientific research had been conducted on the effects of garlic on Cryptocaryon irritans. If it is effective -- and I believe that it sometimes is -- we don't know for sure why it is effective. Does it interfere with the parasite's ability to locate the host fish? Does eating garlic make the host fish "unattractive" to the parasite? Does eating garlic cause the parasite to disengage from the host fish prior to maturity? Does consumption of garlic by the host fish somehow affect the parasite's ability to successfully complete it's life cycle?

We know for a fact that garlic has some beneficial applications in human medicine because it has been researched extensively. A review of some of those applications led me to discover that the biologically active allicin molecule is created when the garlic is crushed or minced. Alliin is the name given to the amino acid that is present in large quantities in garlic cloves. Alliin is the stable precursor to allicin. Alliin is transformed into allicin when garlic is crushed. The enzyme responsible for this transformation is allinase, which is present in garlic cloves in large amounts (10% of the total protein content -- 10mg/g fresh weight). This transformation takes place within a matter of seconds. There are some commercial processes that transform allicin into a stable powder or extract but I think that best results for our purposes are obtained by feeding freshly minced (crushed) garlic to the fish. My fish seemed to think it was a special treat. I was surprised that they actually ate it. Again, I think it is better to prepared the minced garlic yourself from fresh garlic cloves just before each feeding.

Here is some additional background that I copied from the medical literature. I didn't copy any of the charts or graphs and I left out the current laboratory studies but I think it will give you some good food for thought. A review of this literature has led me to believe that it is quite possible that freshly minced garlic could have as yet unexplained beneficial results when fed to fish.

Garlic cloves are odor-free until crushed or processed when garlic supplements are manufactured and cross-section studies have indicated that the substrate alliin and the enzyme allinase are located in different compartments. This unique organization suggests that it is designed as a potential defense mechanism against microbial pathogens in the soil. Invasion of the cloves by fungi and other soil pathogens causes the interaction between alliin and allinase that rapidly produces allicin and which in turn inactivates the invader. The reactive allicin molecules produced have a very short half-life, as they react with many of the surrounding proteins, including the allinase enzyme, making it into a quasi-suicidal enzyme.

This very efficient organization ensures that the clove defense mechanism is only activated in a very small location and for a short period of time, whereas the rest of the alliin and allinase remain preserved in their respective compartments and are available for interaction in case of subsequent microbial attacks.

Successful clinical use of garlic for treating elevated blood pressure and arteriosclerosis has been known since the early part of this century. It has been reported that regular garlic intake causes both a prolonged lowering of hypertension and an improved sense of well-being in patients. As early as 1928, definite blood pressure decreases were achieved as well as increases in productive heart power with garlic therapy, not only in older patients, but also in younger hypertonic patients.

It is also well established that garlic extracts, in particular the powders can show a significant anti-cholesterol activity. A 12 week study comparing the effect of standardised garlic powder tablets (900mg daily) with that of bezafibrate (600mg daily), one of the most commonly prescribed blood lipid-lowering drugs until the advent of the statins, has also been conducted. The multi-centre, double-blind study was performed with 94 patients having cholesterol and/or triglyceride vales exceeding 250mg/dL. After 4 weeks of treatment, the decreases in cholesterol, LDL cholesterol, and triglyceride levels were all statistically highly significant, and there were no differences between the effects of garlic and bezafibrate. HDL cholesterol values in the course of 4 weeks also increased significantly, again without any differences between the two regimens.

The antibacterial properties of crushed garlic have been known for a long time. Various garlic preparations have been shown to exhibit a wide spectrum of antibacterial activity against Gram-negative and Gram-positive bacteria including species of Escherichia, Salmonella, Staphylococcus, Streptococcus, Klebsiella, Proteus, Bacillus, and C!ostridium. Even acid-fast bacteria such as Mycobacterium tuberculosis are sensitive to garlic. Garlic extracts are also effective against Helicobacter pylori the cause of gastric ulcers. Garlic extracts can also prevent the formation of Staphylococcus enterotoxins A, B, and C1 and also thermonuclease. Cavalito and Bailey were the first to demonstrate that the antibacterial action of garlic is mainly due to allicin. The sensitivity of various bacterial and clinical isolates to pure preparations of allicin is very significant. The antibacterial effect of allicin is of a broad spectrum. In most cases the 50% lethal dose concentrations were somewhat higher than those required for some of the newer antibiotics. Interestingly, various bacterial strains resistant to antibiotics such as methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus as well as other multidrug-resistant enterotoxicogenic strains of Escherichia coli, Enterococcus, Shigella dysenteriae, S. flexneni, and S. sonnei cells were all found to be sensitive to allicin.

Most recently the University of East London have shown that aqueous extracts of allicin when formulated into a simple cream are able to kill vast swathes of the so called "superbug" MRSA (methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus). This nasty bacterium is forever changing its structure and developing resistance to many pharmaceutical antibiotics. This may have a significant effect on people who suffer from skin diseases such as eczema and acne as this bacterium is 6 to 7 times more likely to colonise these patients.

There is a growing body of evidence that garlic may have significant enhancing effects on the immune system. While most of the work has been conducted on animals or in vitro, the human studies that have been conducted are encouraging.

Preliminary studies in humans, using an alliin standardised garlic powder preparation, have demonstrated positive effects on immunoreactions and phagocytosis. In geriatric subjects, the administration of 600mg garlic powder per day for 3 months induced significant (p<0.01) increases in the percentage of phagocytosing peripheral granulocytes and monocytes when tested ex vivo for their ability to engulf Escherichia coli bacteria. The cell counts of lymphocyte cell sub-populations were also increased. Another human study was conducted with an unrefined garlic extract (5-10 g/day) which was given to AIDS patients. For the seven patients who completed the 12-week study, there was a major increase in the percent natural killer cell activity from a seriously low mean value of 5+-4% to a more normal mean value of 36+-15%.

The biological activity of allicin extracted from fresh garlic is thought to be related to a combination of factors:

1. its activity as an antioxidant

2. its ability to attack the sulphur (SH) groups in enzymes and proteins and modify their activities and

3. its ability to rapidly penetrate into cells through the cell membranes.

Allicin has a number of beneficial properties, which could act together to enhance the body's response to disease. Published laboratory studies have found that allicin:

>Enhances the activity of phagocytic cells

>Enhances the activity of natural killer cells

>Inhibits the growth of pathogenic micro-organisms

>Inhibits the growth of certain cancer cells

One of the main problems with laboratory studies has been the purity of the extracts used, only recently has a purified, natural, stable extract of allicin become available for testing. Recent studies in our own laboratory have confirmed the antibacterial activity of this purified allicin extract against a number of different bacteria including multiply antibiotic resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA). Clinical trials with this substance are currently underway.
 
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Re: garlic facts

<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=14082952#post14082952 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by spamreefnew
hi all , i was just reading some threds on garlic,and was wondering if anybody has found any science facts about it yet? i once used garlic in my main display to treat 2 clowns,chromis,and 1 royal gramma. the only fish that did not become 100% healthy was the royal gramma. this was the fish that refused to eat the garlic. this was about 2 onths ago. is the ich still lurking in my sand? did i just get lucky? or did the garlic realy make the fishes blood taste like crap causing the ich to die off?
Click to expand...
:) Over 80% of marine fish that survive and infestation of crytocaryon irritans develop a level of immunity(Burgess and Matthews 1995).Level of immunity does not equal complete immunity. It is likely that even with apparently healthy fish in a previously infested tank that they are harboring some number of parasites in the more vulnerable tissues of the nose mouth and gills unseen, So yes the ich probaly still lurks in your tank waiting for a stress event or newcomer without any immunity. One strain in one study expired after 34 life cycles (11 months) even though there were available hosts. While this may be attributable to cell aging and asexual reproduction; it is only one study and one strain.
 
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