What Garlic Can Do for You

What’s the best way to incorporate garlic medicinally into your life? Kirsten Carle, ND, a naturopath at The Stram Center for Integrative Medicine in Delmar, New York, shares a few tips:

  • If you’re looking to fight infections, then garlic is at its best in raw form, meaning the crushed, fresh cloves.
  • As a general immune booster, add garlic liberally to foods every day and take additionally as a supplement in tincture, capsule, or syrup form at first sign of cold or flu.
  • For heart protection and anticancer benefits, daily intake in capsule or tincture form is recommended; although raw or cooked garlic will still provide some benefit.
  • Garlic in all of its many forms—raw or cooked in the diet, dried and powdered in capsules, or prepared in tinctures, syrups, or even topical—provides benefits. You can use the form that suits your tastes and lifestyle and know that your body will appreciate it.
Click to See Our Sources

Personal communication: Kirsten Carle, 5/17

Contributor

Victoria Dolby Toews, MPH

Victoria Dolby Toews, MPH, is an evidence-based, integrative medicine journalist with more than 20 years of research and writing expertise, She received her Master of Public Health from OHSU-PSU School of Public Health.

She is the author or co-author of numerous books, including Life After Baby (2012), The Green Tea Book, 2nd edition (Penguin, 2008). User’s Guide to Healthy Digestion (Basic Health Publications, 2004), The Soy Sensation (McGraw-Hill, 2002), User’s Guide to Glucosamine and Chondroitin (Basic Health Publications, 2002), The Common Cold Cure (Avery, 1999), and The Green Tea Book (Avery, 1998).

Her work was recognized for excellence as a 2001 finalist for the Maggie Awards (Western Publications Association award honoring editorial excellence in magazines west of the Mississippi River).