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Chronic disease can’t be addressed without diet playing a role. Food is as much medicine as prescription medications are. Helping one another eat better, cook, and learn from what keeps us healthy.

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Is Taking This Enzyme as Effective as a Statin?

4 min readFeb 7, 2025

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As I wrote about recently, natto is one heck of a superfood. The only non-super thing about it can be its texture and taste. But, if you can get over that, the health benefits are significant. One reason is its probiotic nature and the fact that the particular. These spores have an easier time surviving in your gut before making it to your large intestine where they add to your microbiome.

In addition to the gut benefits, natto has a beneficial effect on cardiovascular health. The main enzyme, called nattokinase, is the ingredient in natto and is responsible for many of the positive effects. Not only does it help to thin the blood (meaning less atherosclerosis) but it also helps with blood pressure and lipid levels.

I know. Sounds too good to be true.

But we need solutions. Statin prescriptions keep going up along with the incidence of heart disease. If a cheap nutritional supplement can help reduce deaths from the number one killer of people, I am all for it.

Clot destroyer

Nattokinase was discovered in 1987 but natto has been eaten for thousands of years in Japan. Since…

Culinary Medicine
Culinary Medicine

Published in Culinary Medicine

Chronic disease can’t be addressed without diet playing a role. Food is as much medicine as prescription medications are. Helping one another eat better, cook, and learn from what keeps us healthy.

Dr. Julian Barkan
Dr. Julian Barkan

Written by Dr. Julian Barkan

Family Med Physician writing to express my thoughts, sometimes teach, and mostly learn. Editor of Flipping the Script/Patient Perspectives/Culinary Medicine

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