-fact or fiction WASHINTON: Garlic – long touted as a wonder food for treating everything from the common cold to heart aliments – is one of the most popular dietary supplements in the United States.
But a new study published in the Feb 26 issue of Archive of Internal Medicine questions one popular notion: that raw garlic supplements may help lower cholesterol.
Forty-nine participants in the study were randomly assigned to receive raw garlic, 47 to take a powdered garlic supplements, 48 others took an aged garlic supplement, while 48 took a placebo.
The nearly three-year study determined that none of the garlic treatments had a “statistically significant” impact in treating high cholesterol – despite the fact that many garlic supplements are promoted as cholesterol-lowering agents. However, the researchers could not rule out garlic’s effectiveness in treating other ailments.
“The result do not demonstrate that garlic has no usefulness in the prevention of cardiovascular disease,” the authors wrote.
The reported no serious side-effects from giving the study’s subjects intensive doses of garlic, although breath and body odour problems were reported by more than half of the subjects in the raw garlic group -AFP
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