Heart Beat: Policosanol: A sweet nothing for high cholesterol
Heart Beat
A dietary supplement made from sugar cane doesn't lower cholesterol as advertised. Posts on the Internet and magazine ads claim that taking policosanol, which is extracted from the waxy coating of sugar cane, lowers LDL (bad) cholesterol by 25%. That's about as much as a modestly powerful statin. One problem with this claim is that the lion's share of the evidence comes from a single commercial lab in Cuba that markets the supplement.
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