3 useful facts about garlic pills

Garlic has long been used to bolster good health. If you’re thinking about using garlic pills for getting benefits  without the odorous side effects, these 3 tips will help you make the right decision.

Garlic can fight infections so help in the prevention of colds. In lab tests, garlic extract has blocked the growth of bacteria, viruses and fungi.

There's not much proof that popping a daily garlic tablet will keep you infection-free, but it may have some benefits. Take a look at these facts:

• In one study 146 volunteers took garlic capsules at the start of winter.
• Half took daily capsules containing illicit, which appears to be the active element in garlic.
• The other half of the volunteers took placebos.
• By winter's end, the garlic users had caught 24 colds compared to 65 among the placebo group.
• When a member of the garlic group got a cold, the symptoms lasted only a day and a half on average, compared to the typical five-day cold among the people given placebos.

However, you need more extensive research for definitive conclusions that garlic supports health.

The thing is, if you take away the properties that give garlic its distinct small, you strip it of many of its medicinal qualities as well. These facts may help:

• Most companies that sell garlic supplements claim their products are "odourless," but some products are made odourless by "aging" garlic cloves in alcohol for months.
• This process removes the offending compounds that cause bad breath — but these are the same compounds that many of provide garlic's health benefits.
• Aged garlic supplements won't give you bad breath but they are not very effective either.

Enteric-coated garlic tablets could be an alternative. These are designed to dissolve in the small intestine, not in the stomach, so they're less likely to cause bad breath.

One problem is that they don’t always dissolve so do not release their healing qualities. Others are impotent because the ingredients don’t work as well as expected either by themselves or together, and they fail to produce the results you want - protection for your health.

There are so many ways that garlic is meant to look after your health that it’s natural to want to find out about what the pill version offers.

The only way to decide on making a garlic pill part of your daily supplement regime is by knowing the facts.

These 3 quick tips will help equip you to make a decision on regular use of garlic pills.