Kudzu and Alcohol
Every time there is a story about how a naturally occuring herb can combat and possibly defeat an illness, symptom, or behavior that Western medicine cant seem to quell, it interests me. A quote from a story making the wires this week….
Heavy drinkers who tried the herbal extract kudzu for one week downed fewer drinks than people who received an inactive placebo treatment, according to new study findings released Monday.
Study author Dr. Scott E. Lukas of McLean Hospital and Harvard Medical Center in Massachusetts explained that during the experiment, people drank their first beer right away, but were less likely to want more beer if they had taken kudzu the previous week.
“This means that the first beer must have satisfied their initial desire for alcohol,” Lukas suggested.
He said that kudzu may also help deliver blood to the brain, making people more satisfied with less alcohol. “We can see this in the data because people took more sips in order to finish each beer, but the sips were much smaller,” Lukas said.
“The net result was that a binge drinker - someone who drinks 4-5 drinks at one sitting - was reduced to just a few beers,” he told Reuters Health.
Kudzu is one of the ingredients of the Chinese herbal medicine XJL, otherwise known as NPI-028, used for hundreds of years in China to treat inebriation.
Kudzu contains isoflavones, antioxidants believed to confer a variety of health benefits. Previous research has shown that kudzu extracts help discourage drinking in rats and hamsters.
April 27th, 2006 at 10:07 pm
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