Here is an excellent excerpt from the Harvard Gazzette. I hope this sheds some light on the true power of nutrition therapy for heart health.

Harvard researchers have found that rutin a substance in buckwheat And tea have potent anticlotting powers that can help prevent heart attack and stroke researchers discovered Rutin’s anti-thrombotic property when the screen to set a 5000 compounds for their ability to block the action of a key protein involved in the formation of vessel clotting blood clots. When Rutin rose to the top of the list it was very surprising and “We still don’t understand exactly why it is so potent”.

“It’s not always fully appreciated that the majority of Americans will die as the result of a blood clot and either their heart or their brain” says senior author Robert Flaumenhaft, an investigator in the division of homeostasis and thrombosis at BIDMC and associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. “Approximately half of all morbidity and mortality in the United States can be attributed to a heart attack or stroke.”

“Even with the use of existing anticlotting therapies such as aspirin, Plavix, and Coumadin each year there are approximately 400,000 recurrent episodes of my patients who previously experienced a stroke or heart attack”, says Flaumenhaft.

“A safe and inexpensive drug that could reduce recurrent clots could help save thousands of lives.” he added “these pre-clinical trials provide proof of principle that PDI is an important therapeutic target for anti-thrombotic therapy and because the FDA has already established that rutin and is safe, we are poised to expeditiously test this idea in a clinical trial, without the time and expense required to establish the safety of a new drug. Rutin proved to be the most potent antithrombotic compound that we have ever tested in this model. Of particular note, rutin was shown to inhibit both platelet accumulation and fibrin generation during thrombus formation. Clots occur in both arteries and veins. Clots in arteries are platelet rich while those in veins are fibrin-rich. This discovery suggested a single agent can treat and prevent both types of clots”.