Want to reduce your risk for heart disease? Skip the pine bark supplements, study says

Have you ever heard of taking pine bark extract to lower your blood pressure and other risk factors for heart diease?

If not, it’s just as well. A study being published in Tuesday’s edition of Archives of Internal Medicine reports that it doesn’t work.

There was reason to be hopeful. Apparently, the extract – derived from the bark of Pinus pinaster trees – contains lots of antioxidants. It’s supposed ability to lower blood pressure had “biologic plausibility,” according to the study.

So researchers from the Stanford University School of Medicine and the Palo Alto Medical Foundation Research Institute recruited 130 volunteers. They weren’t exactly a picture of good health – all were either overweight or obese; all were either hypertensive or prehypertensive; and many had high cholesterol.

Roughly half of the volunteers were asked to take four pills containing a total of 200 milligrams of pine bark extract each morning. The rest were given placebo pills that looked and tasted exactly the same. The researchers said they chose a daily dose of 200 mg because it aligned with the dosages used in other studies. Neither the volunteers nor the researchers knew which pills were real and which were fake until after the 12-week trial.

Both groups saw a slight decrease in their blood pressure readings, but the difference wasn’t statistically significant. Also unchanged were blood cholesterol, glycemic metabolism, inflammation and body fat.

The only difference that was statistically significant was body mass index – it rose slightly among those taking the pine bark extract and fell slightly among volunteers who swallowed the dummy pills.

On the plus side, the pine bark extract was found to be safe.

The study was funded by Toyo Shinyaku Co. of Japan, which makes pine bark supplements.

-- Karen Kaplan / Los Angeles Times