Fenugreek

Precautions

Medical advice is essential in cases of treated diabetes: fenugreek lowers blood glucose and its effect adds to that of the treatment. The most comprehensive meta-analysis on diabetes reveals neither hepatic nor renal toxicity. Also worth knowing: the evidence is not of the same quality depending on the use, and this is the entire point of this profile. On blood glucose and lipids, it relies on dozens of randomized trials — but the authors themselves point out uneven quality and strong heterogeneity from one study to another. On testosterone, the one sought after in the gym, the meta-analysis brings together only four trials, and the one focusing on athletes explicitly speaks of a small effect. Several of the most favorable trials involve patented extracts, and two of them are open-label, without placebo: this is the lowest level of evidence for a product sold on this precise promise. Weight and BMI, meanwhile, do not budge — a meta-analysis of twelve trials says so in black and white. Finally, on milk supply, the effect exists but remains clearly inferior to that of other herbs compared in the same analysis, and on painful periods the quality of the evidence is considered low.