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Recently in Salon Health & Body

Orgasms and outrage
Experts on female sexual dysfunction gather in Boston and dance with their shirts off.
By Barbara Raab
[10/28/99]

Urge
The Hookergram
A sordid tale grows in Manhattan.
By Tracy Quan
[10/28/99]

Urge: Naked World
Hermaphrodites are safe in ... Colombia?
How has a country known for its indiscriminate violence become the global haven for sexual diversity?
By Hank Hyena
[10/28/99]

Books
The mysterious mind
One author doubts that we will ever explain and control the brain.
By Arthur Allen
[10/27/99]

Urge: Naked World
Man caught snatching a plastic snatch
Abandoned and unemployed, a man makes the mistake of getting caught with his hands in some artificial pants.
By Hank Hyena
[10/27/99]

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Rats that ate a gram of dried onion daily had stronger bones (around 15 percent stronger) in just four weeks. Actually there were good results with 14 different vegetables, including arugula, cucumber, dill, lettuce, parsley and tomato. Because osteoporosis is a particular concern in women after menopause, the researchers created quasi-menopausal rats (by removing their ovaries), and plied them with onions -- Lo! the onion inhibited bone loss. It didn't stop it, but reduced it by about a quarter. And the more onions they ate, the stronger the effect.

"However, what with garlic for the heart and onions for the bones, postmenopausal women may live to be sprightly centenarians but may end up with few close friends," snickered the press release.

Some things always seem to get a laugh. Cartoonists know that any body part is funnier with a band-aid on it. Accordions are funny, tubas are funny, Kenneth Starr falling in a mud puddle is funny. Onions and garlic are funny. They are members of the Allium genus, along with leeks and so forth, and it's hard to do a dignified survey of Allium therapies. You keep tripping on the stink jokes.

Note that other vegetables were also involved in the Swiss study, but the onions get the ink. Dill, for example, could use a publicist. As onions and their close relative garlic would tell you, any publicity is good publicity. At least, that's what their PR firm tells them. But would Dan "Potatoe" Quayle agree?

There's some evidence that a steady diet of onions and garlic is good for your heart and circulatory system, lowers your chance of getting certain kinds of cancer and may even discourage parasites. There's also some evidence that these medical benefits are largely imaginary, and that what onions and garlic are really good for is lowering stress by making food taste better. But -- insert obligatory joke about the reek here -- some say typecasting may be a problem. The authors of "Garlic, Cancer and Heart Disease," Dr. Orville Green III and Nicholas Polydoris, worry that "It is possible that modern society has shunned this history of therapeutic effectiveness because of the odor associated with ingestion of fresh garlic."

Onions and garlic are old hands at the I-don't-care-what-they-say-about-me-as-long-as-they-spell-my- name-right game. A Turkish legend says that when Satan left the Garden of Eden after the Fall, onions grew from the spot where he set his right foot and garlic from where he set his left foot. Following Satan, I'm going to discuss onions and garlic together, as if they were just two different footprints of the same fallen angel, since they have many of the same active ingredients.

Next page | Moses had to handle complaints about lack of onions and garlic