Quack-y cure for Heart disease?

Is this the age of “QUACKS” in the medicine area?  Well, it certainly does seem so from the different new pills and cures coming out each touting itself to be better than the last one.

But this is truly a quacky cure!!  A red yeast rice is used for red coloring of the Peking duck.  This coloring has been tested to amazing heart disease fighting abilities!

The benefits:

– can cut the risk of dying from heart disease by a third and cancer by two-thirds
– nearly halves the risk of a second heart attack and reduces the odds of cardiac surgery

This agent has been used in China for thousands of years as a food preservative, colourant and seasoning, and herbal medicine.  But a new study shows all those benefits could be real!

For the study, scientists tracked heart attack survivors at more than 60 hospitals in China.

They focused mainly on heart disease, but cancer deaths were also recorded. Each day, patients took capsules of a partially purified extract of the red yeast rice preparation Xuezhikang – XZK – or an inactive dummy supplement. Researchers compared the progress of the groups over five years. To their surprise, they found taking the supplements cut the odds of death from heart problems and cancer.