Thursday, April 14, 2016

Powdered Booze Can Reduce Arterial Cholesterol Plaque By 40%

Partaay!
From our intro to 2013's "Can Powdered Water Cure Droughts?":
...Some years ago I was approached by a company seeking financing for their powdered vodka. 
When I was done laughing I had some research done on the principals and decided against doing anything with them.  
As it turned out the SEC eventually shut down another of their enterprises, thus besmirching the otherwise pristine reputation of the Boca Raton investment community. 
The powdered booze however turned out to be real, albeit with a patent owned by General Foods rather than the scamsters. 
Who knew?
From Popular Science:


Powdered Booze
About a 50:50 mixture of Everclear and cyclodextrins
 Matt Hartings, American University
Fats and cholesterol that build up along the insides of blood vessels can limit the flow of blood around the heart, causing heart attacks or strokes. To treat this condition, called atherosclerosis, millions of Americans take drugs every day—the most popular of these, statins, alone cost up to $13 billion per year in 2014, and these don’t work for every patient. Now scientists have discovered that a compound already approved by the FDA can dissolve away this buildup in the blood vessels more effectively than existing treatments. The researchers published their study today in Science Translational Medicine.

The compound is called beta-cyclodextrin, and it’s already used in some pharmaceuticals to bind the active drug to fatty acids in the body where it is most needed.

Now, here's the good news: beta-cyclodextrin is also the main ingredient used to make powdered alcohol. Pour booze into a heap of cyclodextrin, and the alcohol molecules cling to the ring-shaped cyclodextrin molecules, making a fluffy dry powder that packs a punch.

The researchers suspected that the same compound delivered into the blood stream could bind to those plaques around the blood vessels.

To test their hypothesis, the researchers fed mice a cholesterol-heavy diet for 12 weeks, which they knew would lead to a buildup of fatty plaques in their blood vessels. After eight weeks, they started injecting the mice with cyclodextrin twice per week. Over the remaining four weeks, the researchers found that the compound reduced the plaques by 46 percent without affecting the mice’s overall cholesterol level....MORE
Okay, maybe not so much the powdered alcohol as the  beta-cyclodextrin.
But that's no reason not to partaay!

If interested see also 2015's:
"Everything You Want to Know About Palcohol, the Powdered Alcohol Approved by Feds"