Monday, June 18, 2007

Smelling like a doctor

Probably smelling like a doctor means not smelling at all. Maybe a touch of lemon, or a soapy clean sort of scent, but certainly not oh de' garlic.

I've mentioned that I love my supplements, and I love www.puritan.com for ordering my dietary substitutes. Right now they're running a 3 for 1 sale. When I accidentally ordered garlic from them, it was buy 2 get 3. So I now have 1,250 capsules of garlic oil, and dear heaven how this stuff reeks. Puritan's Pride supplements generally get thumbs up ratings on Consumer Lab testing, but I knew that WYSIWYG just from the smell and the aftertaste.

While Consumer Lab reviews are a bit lukewarm about the good of garlic, a glance at the medical literature through a MedLine search is almost convincing enough to get me to take this stuff. Garlic promotes the healthy function of blood vessels, inhibits the formation of those pesky nanoplaques (itty bitty deposits of LDL-cholesterol in the arterial walls), and best of all for me because I personally fear dementia worst of all, garlic prevents neuronal apoptosis which is aging brain cell suicide.

But gad, I just can't do it. I suppose I could chuck these smelly capsules and by the scent-free kind, but instead they sit in my cupboard and I save my neurons with crossword puzzles instead.

1 comment:

B. N. Sullivan said...

For what it's worth -- I seem to remember reading somewhere that garlic oil/capsules do not deliver the wished-for benefits of fresh garlic, because the extracts lack co-factors that are present in the fresh stuff. Isolates don't work without the naturally occurring co-factors (or something like that!).