High doses can also make you develop tolerance much faster than lower doses so they may be less effective in the long term. As with most other herbs and herbal supplements, it is best to cycle kudzu and take a break from it for about two days per week to reset your tolerance back to baseline. That will keep your body sensitive https://ecosoberhouse.com/article/top-10-substance-abuse-group-activities/ to the herb and allow you to keep getting the benefits in the long term. Lukas and Lee hold a patent for kudzu extract to treat alcohol abuse and dependence. McLean Hospital has licensed the production of kudzu extract (NPI-031) to Natural Pharmacia International (NPI), Inc. that markets it as Alkontrol-Herbal™.
Best time to take kudzu
Scientists need to do more human studies to determine its effectiveness in other areas, like inflammation, heart health, and headaches. Another study found that people who took puerarin, an isoflavone extract from the kudzu plant, prior to drinking took longer to consume alcoholic beverages (3). For over 2,000 years, people have used kudzu root in traditional Chinese medicine for purposes like treating fevers, diarrhea, and even diabetes and heart disease (1). The ability of puerarin and related isoflavones to facilitate alcohol’s entry into the brain has not been systematically studied. For this mechanism to be plausible, the more rapid penetration of alcohol into the brain would have to trigger a satiety mechanism rather quickly such that the desire for the next drink is delayed—thus interrupting a binge episode.
The big experiment: how can I get my body to burn more fat, without doing more exercise?
If I had been committed to using it to wean off of alcohol and then quit, it might have been a very valuable part of my recovery. I did not know at the time that people also use it to treat alcohol withdrawal symptoms; nor did I care, because I did not intend to quit at the time. The kudzu to stop drinking finding that alcohol intake was reduced without affecting desire to use alcohol at first seemed counter-intuitive. However, it is important to recognize that one of the major weaknesses of the measure that we used to record desire to drink alcohol was that it was unidimensional.
Kudzu’s Benefits for Health
- Milder cases — when people abuse alcohol but aren’t dependent on it — are as well.
- Other limitations of the present study are the use of a rather narrow aged male population who drink only at moderate levels.
- During the baseline session, the placebo-randomized group consumed 2.7 ± 0.78 beers before treatment and increased consumption to 3.4 ± 1.1 beers after treatment.
Kudzu is being investigated for treatment of alcohol use disorder and cervical spondylosis; the estrogenic activity and cardioprotective effects of kudzu and its constituent puerarin are also under investigation. However, limited clinical studies exist to recommend use for any indication. The number of participants who drank each available beer during the 1.5 hour drinking session following administration of placebo or kudzu.
Medication adherence was measured using ultraviolet (UV) light to detect riboflavin in centrifuged urine samples (Del Boca et al., 1996) that were collected twice a week. Endogenous levels of riboflavin are too low to fluoresce and participants were instructed to avoid multivitamin complexes while participating in the study. Because riboflavin is cleared from the body quickly, fluorescing urine indicated compliance in the past 18–24 hours. In addition, participants reported pill taking by checking time-of-day boxes on daily diaries and by entries on the wrist actigraphy watches.
Nor will it drastically enhance your quality of life after the first dose. However, if you want to cut down on drinking or detoxify your body during alcohol withdrawal, this plant may be able to help. Urine samples were qualitatively analyzed by HPLC for puerarin levels on a weekly basis starting on the second week of baseline and continuing through the two follow-up visits. Although blood samples were collected from all participants to examine the safety of kudzu, only the last 12 subjects had blood samples collected for quantitative analysis of puerarin levels. Fifty-one percent of adults over the age of 18 and 56% of those age 18–44, are current regular drinkers (Schiller et al., 2012).