 Dietary strategies for the treatment of lead toxicity are often based on rodent studies. However, for tofu, at least, there was a population study of people showing lower lead levels in men and women who ate more tofu. They controlled for a whole bunch of factors, so it's not like tofu lovers were protected just because they smoked less or ate less meat, but you can't control for everything, ideally. What we'd have is a randomized placebo-controlled study. Take a group of people exposed to lead, split them up into two groups, half get the food, half get some kind of identical placebo food, and see what happens. Easy to do with drugs. You can just use look-alike sugar pills as placebos. So people don't know what group they're in, but how do you make placebo food? One way to do disguised food interventions is to use foods that are so potent they can be stuffed in a pill, like garlic. There had been various studies on the effects of garlic in rats, and as a potential antidote for lead intoxication distributed among different mouse organs. But who eats mouse organs? This animal study had some direct human relevance, though the effect of garlic on lead contents in chicken tissues. To explore the possible uses of garlic to clean up lead contents in chickens, which, like all of us on planet Earth, have been exposed to lead pollution in hopes we can minimize the hazard of lead-polluted chicken meat. And it worked. Feeding garlic to chickens reduces lead levels in the edible mass of the chicken, by up to 75% or more. Even if you don't give them lead, raise them on distilled water, they end up with some lead in their meat and giblets. We just live in such a polluted world. But actively feed them lead for a week, and the levels get really high. But give them the same amount of lead with a little garlic added, give them some garlicky lead, and much less lead accumulates in their bodies. Okay, but here's the crazy part. Same amount of lead, but this time you wait a week and then give the garlic, and it worked even better. The value of garlic in reducing lead concentrations was more pronounced when given afterwards, after the lead was stopped, after the lead had already built up in the tissues. See, we used to think that the beneficial effects of garlic against lead toxicity was primarily due to a reaction between lead and sulfur compounds in the garlic that would glom onto the lead and the intestinal tract and flush it out of the body. But what this study showed is that garlic appears to contain compounds that can actually pull lead, not just out of the intestinal contents, but out of the tissues of the body. So the results indicate that garlic contains chelating compounds capable of enhancing elimination of lead, so garlic feeding can be exploited to safeguard human consumers by minimizing lead concentrations in meat. But if garlic is so effective at pulling lead out of chicken's bodies, why not exploit garlic feeding more directly by eating it ourselves? Well, there had never been a study on the ability of garlic to help lead exposed humans until now. Actually, I'm embarrassed to say the study was published back in 2012, but I missed it. That was when I was just setting up NutritionFacts.org, getting it up and running. Now that we have a staff and a whole research team, hopefully important studies like this won't slip through the cracks in the future. But here we go, a head-to-head comparison of the therapeutic effects of garlic versus a chelation therapy drug called deep penicillamine. 117 workers exposed to lead in the car battery industry were randomly assigned into one of two groups, the drug three times a day or an eighth of a teaspoon of garlic powder compressed into a tablet three times a day. That's about the equivalent of two cloves of fresh garlic a day for a month. As expected, the chelation drug reduced blood lead levels by about 20%, but so did the garlic. The garlic worked just as well as the drug and of course had fewer side effects. Thus, garlic seems safer and as effective, but saying something is as effective as chelation therapy isn't saying much. Remember how for chronic lead poisoning, chelation drugs can lower blood levels but don't actually improve neurological function? Okay, you ready? This is where it gets amazing. Significant clinical improvements were seen in the garlic group. Less irritability, fewer headaches, improvements in their reflexes and blood pressure after treatment with garlic, but not the drug. So garlic was safer and more effective. Therefore, garlic can be recommended for the treatment of mild to moderate lead poisoning.