As many people have heard, a team of medical researchers affiliated with Harvard Medical School Recently reported that the common Chinese herb kudzu (Pueraria lobata), which also grows as a wayside vine in the U.S. Southeast, helps to suppress the desire for alcohol (Lukas et al. 2005). This finding was first described in 1970s research with animals specially bred to be alcohol-dependent; work corroborating these earlier findings was concucted from 1996 to 2003 (Overstreet et al. 1996; Overstreet et al.2003).
Kudzu, however, has played a prominent role for centuries in herbal formulas designed to deal with human drunkenness. The Chinese appeared not to postulate why kudzu might work; they simply observed its effects over generations. Anecdotal data suggest that kudzu works to reduce alcohol cravings in up to 80% of alcohol abusers. This stimulated early pharmacological researchers to investigate kudzu's mechanisms of action.
Kudzu is native to China, where it was widely used as a starch-rich food, a food thickener, and a medicine. It has also been naturalized in the Southeast, where it climbs prolifically over trees, creating a panoramic backdrop at dusk that is reminiscent of Jurassic Park, with shapes similar to every dinosaur imaginable. Eventually kudzu's sheer lushness kills its host trees. It is said to grow so fast that if one is stopped at a traffic light too long it will grab the tires!
Kudzu is considered by most to be a scourge of a weed. However, according to one of the most respected works of herbal medicine in Chinese literature, Ben Cao Gang Mu (1596) or the Great Compendium of Materia Medica of Li Shi Zhen, kudzu root was reported to detoxify alcohol. Subsequently kudzu became a feature in many formulas throughout the centuries for the relief of drunkenness.
