Home Cures That Work

Every day, Fan Zhenglun drinks a bitter green brew, part water and part crushed "pseudoginseng." Practitioners of traditional Chinese medicine consider this plant, local to southern China, an effective way to lower cholesterol, and Fan, the trim, 58-year-old vice director of the Cui Yue-Li Traditional Medicine Research Center in Beijing, had long prescribed it for his own patients. When his doctor told him he had high cholesterol in 1997, he decided to try it himself. "Now my blood pressure and cholesterol are normal," he says. "Every day, I drink two cups, and I take a walk."

Many Chinese people mistrust Western medicine, and high-cholesterol sufferers like Fan are no exception. They believe the condition, is only a symptom of imbalances in the body. When qi, or energy, is not flowing smoothly, only traditional medicine can cleanse the blood and get the qi running again. Western scientists have never been comfortable with this explanation, but they confirm that some traditional medicines really do lower cholesterol.

The most recent study shows that green and black teas do the trick. David Maron, a heart doctor at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, had 240 Chinese men and women--already on low-fat diets to lower their cholesterol--take a capsule of tea extracts every day for 12 weeks. The treatment reduced low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol (the "bad" kind) by an average of 16 percent. Although the study was sponsored by Nashville-based Nashai Biotech, which sells the capsules in China, Maron performed the tests on the condition that he publish the results no matter what. The findings, published in Archives of Internal Medicine in June, surprised him. Heavy-tea-drinking populations have always had fewer cases of high cholesterol and other health problems, but Maron didn't expect to find such a strong cause-and-effect relationship. His study is the first to show that some combination of chemicals found naturally in green and black tea significantly lowers cholesterol. (Green tea alone won't do it, past studies have shown.) "On top of [a low-fat] diet, it could be the equivalent of having a 16 to 24 percent lower risk of having a heart attack."

Scientists have just begun to study other traditional Chinese high-cholesterol remedies, but they have a long way to go. Most Chinese remedies actually contain a hodgepodge of plants and herbs that have yet to undergo rigorous scientific study, whether alone or in combination. One popular elixir, for example, mixes turmeric with cattail pollen, lotus leaf and other ingredients. If these treatments prove as effective as tea, even traditional Chinese doctors aren't likely to recommend throwing out statins. They're still the most effective LDL-lowering drugs--they reduce the bad gunk by anywhere from 25 to 60 percent. In fact, many traditional Chinese herbal remedies, including red yeast, contain natural forms of statin. More important, commercial statins have been well tested, and are proven defenses against heart-disease-related deaths. Tea has a long way to go before it can make that claim. For one thing, it's unclear how safe tea capsules are in the long run. It may be natural, but Maron gave his subjects the equivalent of seven cups of high-quality black tea and about seven cups of green tea a day, a pretty strong dose. And scientists don't know whether tea works for everyone. Eventually, extracts may prove to be a useful supplement to statins. For borderline patients like Fan, extracts combined with diet might be just the thing to avoid the waiting room altogether.

© 2003