Why do vampires hate garlic?
Another explanation is because vampires have an elevated sense of smell, touch, sight, and everything. Therefore since garlic is such a pungent vegetable, it irritates a vampire’s senses and they tend to avoid it. Key word is "avoid." If they must, they could go through fields of garlic to get to a meal.
Antimicrobial properties of allicin from garlic.
Source
Department of Biological Chemistry, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot 76100, Israel.
Abstract
Allicin, one of the active principles of freshly crushed garlic homogenates, has a variety of antimicrobial activities. Allicin in its pure form was found to exhibit i) antibacterial activity against a wide range of Gram-negative and Gram-positive bacteria, including multidrug-resistant enterotoxicogenic strains of Escherichia coli; ii) antifungal activity, particularly against Candida albicans; iii) antiparasitic activity, including some major human intestinal protozoan parasites such as Entamoeba histolytica and Giardia lamblia; and iv) antiviral activity. The main antimicrobial effect of allicin is due to its chemical reaction with thiol groups of various enzymes, e.g. alcohol dehydrogenase, thioredoxin reductase, and RNA polymerase, which can affect essential metabolism of cysteine proteinase activity involved in the virulence of E. histolytica.
