Dietary mushroom fibers and their lowering effect on cholesterol
For thousands of years medicinal practitioners in China and Japan have known about the healing powers of mushrooms. Practitioners have used mushrooms to treat heart, liver, stomach, intestines and even improving one’s “chi” with much success. Some mushrooms even contain lovastatin, which is a key ingredient in western medicine statin drugs like methacor and altoprev.
Recently scientists have been doing extensive research on the use of mushrooms to reduce cholesterol in animals.
One such study was conducted in 2001, took laboratory rats and divided them into four groups. The first group was fed cellulose and used as a control group. The other three groups of rats were fed either a mixture of food with shitake, maitake or enokitake mushroom fiber. The experiment lasted four weeks, during which blood was drawn weekly to determine the cholesterol level in each group.
