Is Red Yeast Rice an Effective Home Remedy for High Cholesterol?
One of the best-known over-the-counter nutritional supplements for naturally controlling your cholesterol is a product called Cholestin, which nowadays contains a sugar cane derivative called policosanol. Before the makers of Cholestin began making their product with policosanol, however, they used a natural product that contains exactly the same chemical that is in the cholesterol drug Mevachor. That natural product was red yeast rice. Red yeast rice does not contain a chemical that just works the same way as the statin drug Mevachor (lovastatin). The yeast actually makes Mevachor. When the makers of the older formulation of Cholestin learned that Chinese researchers had confirmed that the fungus can be used to lower both cholesterol and triglycerides, nobody was paying a whole lot of attention to Chinese research. The natural products maker Pharmanex ran its own clinical trials at the University of California at Los Angeles and confirmed that people with high cholesterol who take red