Fatty liver? Garlic to the rescue! Original paper

Nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) affects almost one quarter of the world’s population. It has no licensed pharmacological treatments, but it may be improved by some foods, notably garlic.

In this 15-week, double-blind, randomized controlled trial, 98 NAFLD patients aged 20–70 took tablets containing either garlic powder (800 mg) or a garlic-like placebo.

The primary outcome was the amount of fat in the liver as measured by ultrasound at baseline and week 15.

The secondary outcomes were body weight and concentrations of serum alanine aminotransferase (ALT), aspartate aminotransferase (AST), total cholesterol (TC), low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C), high-density lipoprotein cholesterol (HDL-C), triglycerides (TG), fasting blood sugar (FBS), and hemoglobin A1c (HbA1).

Steatosis (fatty liver) has four degrees of severity. More patients experienced at least one degree of improvement in the garlic group (n=24, 51%) than in the placebo group (n=8, 16%), with the odds of liver-fat reduction with garlic being 5.6 and remaining statistically significant even after adjusting for baseline liver fat and in-trial energy intake, physical activity, and weight loss.

Garlic also improved body weight and serum concentrations of ALT, AST, FBS, HbA1C, TC, and LDL-C.

This was a relatively well-conducted trial. It should be noted, however, that there were multiple secondary comparisons, for which statistical adjustments were not made. This means that we should consider those findings exploratory, especially the ones in which the between-group p-values were close to the null (i.e., body weight and TG).