The weight loss artifact - nattokinase's "popularity on the whole network" began last year, and this wave of fire is different from the fire of similar products before. The first is that it is only popular on the video platform, and the second is that the related videos are all saying that it is not good. Of course, click in and talk about it, and complete Amway with the cooperation of the barrage.
Our audience is generally not fooled by such a routine. Regardless of whether the product is effective or not, if such a big publicity is carried out, the product premium will inevitably be considerable. If you are not IQ, you must pay a lot of taxes. But if nattokinase is a scam, I'm afraid of being slapped in the face in a few years - I have to admit that nattokinase is one of the most eye-brow products in our "IQ tax" series.
Many nattokinase products are written as made in Japan
01
One cook, one taste
Putting aside kinases, let's talk about natto first.
Natto is one of the most popular foods of the Japanese people, and it is also one of the foods that only the Japanese people love. If you want to say how unpalatable it is, it is far worse than stinky tofu and stinky herring, at most it has a slight peculiar smell, and its appearance is even a little fresh and lovely. The only thing that is intimidating is that it is drawn, like some heavy cheeses - they also have a somewhat similar off-flavor, a slight protein fermentation smell. You have to be able to accept the old Beijing bean juice, and the natto is completely sweet.
Drawing~
In Chinese sources, almost always mention the sentence "Natto has been made since the Qin and Han dynasties" recorded in the ancient Japanese book "Wahan Sancai Tukai", but in Japanese sources, this book says that natto was born in Japan. I don't know Japanese, so I didn't check the original text. Actually, the original text is not important, because natto was brought to Japan by the monk Jianzhen, and there is no doubt about it. It's just that in our case, it's not called natto, but tempeh.
Tempeh from Sichuan
When you first arrive in Japan, tempeh is not like today's natto, but probably more like today's dried tempeh or water tempeh in China, and it is a small dish that is pickled with a lot of salt. Influenced by Jianzhen, this food was first only popular in temples, so it was called "Temple Natto" or "Donatto", and this kind of natto is still popular in some small cities in Japan, and the trade name is Shioshin Natto (塩 Xin納豆). Later, the Japanese changed the procedure for making natto, and the now mainstream brushed natto appeared. To be precise, today's mainstream natto originated in China and was born in Japan.
The same beans, the same fermentation, how can it be tempeh, natto, stinky tofu, bean paste, or Indonesian tempeh?
Tempeh, Indonesia
Because the visible fermentation is the same, but the invisible microorganisms are different. The same ingredients, different chefs, of course, make different flavors.
The "chef" of tempeh is a fungus, belonging to the genus Rhizopus, which has a firm texture and a bit of a mushroom taste, while the edamame tofu in Anhui is made of mucormyces and has a soft texture and light taste, and the "chef" of natto is different from them, which is some bacillus subtilis, which is classified as a bacterium, which is very different from the above two categories.
Traditionally, natto ferments steamed beans on high-temperature straw, a process that other microorganisms cannot tolerate, and the bacillus subtilis on the straw alone can survive. It is the difference in strains that gives natto its miraculous ingredient - nattokinase.
Image credit: fooddiversity
02
Science in the dark
I don't know if the production of brushed natto is a coincidence, but it is certain that the discovery of nattokinase is definitely a coincidence.
It is a coincidence, but it is also inevitable. The brilliance of artemisinin belongs to the teacher Tu Youyou, who is engaged in modern chemistry in China, and the discovery of nattokinase belongs to the Japanese who is engaged in pharmacy in the United States. Science doesn't talk about fate, it's just that the probability is high.
You have to see a foreign company, it sounds like a company, and the liars under his banner also give him a headache
At half past two o'clock in the afternoon in 1980, Mr. Sumi, who was researching antithrombotic substances in Chicago, may have seen natto at lunch, and had a whim: the skeleton of the blood clot is fibrin, and natto is also fermented from fibrin.
Unexpectedly, compared with the mainstream thrombolytic drug urokinase, natto's thrombolysis speed is dozens of times faster. This serendipitous discovery is also known as the "two-and-a-half experiment".
Nattokinase structure
We all know that if our skin breaks and bleeds, it will stop very quickly. The same is true for bleeding from blood vessels inside the body. But the stopped blood will become a small lump, or a small blood clot, and it will add up to a lot. So the body has a set of anticoagulant mechanisms to deal with these blood clots.
From a micro perspective, this game can happen at any time, and we unconsciously live in this delicate balance.
Have you ever wondered why these marks are gone in the end?
The urokinase mentioned above is a key to upsetting the balance, allowing the body to produce plasmin to dissolve blood clots. However, this external force upsets the balance, and a slight overdose may lead to bleeding, which is a common problem with all major anticoagulant drugs. The nattokinase in natto not only acts as the key, but also reacts with fibrin itself. Compared with urokinase, the "setter", nattokinase is a pass plus the main attack, and more importantly, the process of this main attack has nothing to do with the above balance, and the experiment has proved that the probability of causing bleeding is greatly reduced.
Isn't that a miracle medicine?
If it were that easy, so many people wouldn't die from blood clots every year.
图片来自：the fruity jem
03
Taxes that can be expected in the future
Everything mentioned above is an in vitro experiment. You know, the outside of the body and the inside are like barriers, which are completely different things. Otherwise, what kind of kinase do you need, drink concentrated sulfuric acid to dissolve quickly.
Kinase is also a protein, and when eaten, it is digested into amino acids, and its own role is gone. Therefore, many drugs can only be administered by injection, not orally, and so is urokinase.
In a large number of unreliable animal experiments, researchers have found that nattokinase can partially avoid digestion and be absorbed, as for how much this part is, I am not optimistic. In various studies that have proved that oral nattokinase can effectively dissolve thrombolysis and even lower blood pressure and blood lipids, the impact is very small. For example, after giving natto protein orally to a hypertensive patient with a blood pressure of about 150\90 for a period of time, the blood pressure was 2-3 mm Hg lower than that of the control group. Do you say it works? Yes, but for real hypertensive patients, it's just an itch in the boot.
It should be said that nattokinase is not a completely useless gimmick, it is fundamentally different from eating radish with chicken blood. Even after reading a bunch of research data, I'm willing to believe that there are possible benefits to taking nattokinase for patients with old blood clots. However, the speed and price of the benefits are not satisfactory for the time being.
The popular nattokinase on the online platform is generally 4000 fu tablets (fu can be simply understood as the content), and a bottle of 100 tablets is hundreds of yuan. Urokinase injections for treatment cost tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of fu injections, and you can imagine the effectiveness of these health products.
As for those who want to lose weight with nattokinase, they can wash and sleep.
Seeing this, you may have the same idea as me - why not study nattokinase injection? Unfortunately, I have not found any successful cases in this area in Chinese and foreign literature, and there are even very few experiments. You must know that the research and development of new drugs is extremely expensive and time-consuming, and it is already very fast to produce one drug in ten years. What's more, the number and effect of existing anticoagulants are not bad, and the status of the rivers and lakes is very stable, and the research and development of these drugs also cost money.
It is likely that in the next ten or twenty years, nattokinase will officially become a drug and even play an effective role in many fields, which is certainly what we want to see.
But for the time being, I can only say that unless you are rich, you should eat natto, and you can also supplement vitamin K2!
纳豆牛油果拌饭，要不试试？图片来自：town&country markets
Written by: The letter rises and falls
Reprinted from: Naturalist