RED YEAST RICE has been used in East Asia for centuries to make alcohol and fermented foods. Certain strains have also been used in herbal remedies. Today, it sits on American supplement shelves with a modern promise: lower your cholesterol naturally without taking a prescription statin.
For people uneasy about statins, a natural alternative might sound pretty great. Why take a prescription medication with some notoriously bad side effects when you could pop something fermented from rice instead? Online, a growing number of Reddit threads host users who say their PCPs and cardiologists have prescribed them red yeast rice extract instead of statins.
At a time when eligibility for statins has expanded to include younger and low-risk individuals, what’s going on here? TO UNDERSTAND THE debate over red yeast rice, it’s a good reminder to know what a statin does in the first place. Cholesterol in general isn’t harmful; the body needs it to build cells and make certain hormones.
But there’s good cholesterol and bad cholesterol. The problem is having too much LDL (the “bad cholesterol”) in the bloodstream over time, which can contribute to plaque buildup in the arteries, says Dr. By slowing cholesterol production in the liver, statins prompt the liver to pull more LDL from the blood.
Depending on the drug and dose, statins can lower LDL by about 30 to 50 percent. The payoff is more than a better cholesterol number, though. Statins also reduce inflammation in artery walls and help stabilize existing plaque, ultimately lowering the risk that it will rupture and cause a heart attack or stroke.
It has a long history in China and across East Asia, where it has been used as a food coloring, in rice wine, and in traditional medicine. In the United States, red yeast rice is mainly used as a dietary supplement for controlling cholesterol. So does red yeast rice actually work to lower cholesterol?
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