Home cures that work.(Chinese high-cholesterol remedies)

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 ...