Will a supplement supplant prescription drugs for heart health?
Nattokinase: The Best Thing for Your Heart?
A Supplement that Might Replace Many Drugs
Nattokinase, a readily available, safe, inexpensive supplement, appears to have cardiovascular benefits that at first are hard to believe.
I can’t do it. I just can’t stomach starting another heart disease article – as appears to be the custom – by wasting your time explaining the grim statistics regarding cardiovascular disease. They’re ugly. You know that.
What you need instead are solutions, solutions to thwart the many maddening things that can affect the operation of the heart. We should be able to maintain the working integrity of this biological pump, keep it beating strong, keep its pipes clear of gunk, and keep the blood that flows through it clean and fluid until we’re ready to leave this mortal coil either on our own terms or getting hit on the head by some other falling anvil of catastrophe, and not by something so mundane as faulty plumbing.
Sure, medical science has lots of answers. We’ve got lifestyle modifications (i.e., exercise and diet), psychological interventions (stress relief), surgical interventions, and drugs, all of which have shown varying degrees of success. We’ve also got supplements but mention any of them – other than maybe prescription fish oil 1
or coenzyme Q10 – to most cardiologists and they’ll make a face, the same face they’d make if you held a small turd underneath their noses.
But there’s a relatively unknown supplement – at least in the Western world – that they should take a whiff of. It appears to be the medicinal utility player of all medicinal utility players as it’s antithrombotic (clot-busting), antihypertensive (blood pressure lowering), anticoagulant (blood thinning) and anti-atherosclerotic (plaque dissolving).
Its name is “nattokinase,” and some researchers think it has the potential to replace several prescribed heart medications while also ensuring that the hearts of healthy people stay healthy.
Natto-What?
Nattokinase is an enzyme derived from Natto, a traditional Japanese food made from fermented soybeans that’s often eaten for breakfast. It’s pretty gross looking, at least to those that aren’t accustomed to it. It looks like zombified soybeans that leave long, cheesy strings of organic matter when you pull them apart with chopsticks.
Natto has been around for at least 2,000 years, and people who ate it regularly seemed to be less prone to developing heart disease. It wasn’t until 1987 that a team of Japanese researchers figured out that natto contained a potent fibrinolytic (clot-preventing) enzyme that they named nattokinase.
Since then, a relatively small number of compelling studies on both animals and humans have confirmed that finding, along with discovering that it also has the aforementioned antithrombic, antihypertensive, and anti-atherosclerotic properties.
I’ll readily admit that there hasn’t been enough research on nattokinase to cast all doubt as to its efficacy away, but there’s a reason for that – nattokinase can’t be patented. No one’s going to get rich off it, let alone be compensated for what they spent to conduct a study on it.
Nevertheless, the studies that have been done are pretty convincing, at least to me. Consider that there’s no other drug or supplement that possesses multiple CVD preventative and alleviating pharmacologic effects. What’s more, it can be taken orally in capsule form, it’s ridiculously inexpensive, and its safety record is, so far, impeccable.
Let’s take a relatively painless look at the supportive research. - at the link