 Medicinal plants are said to be nature's gift to human beings to promote a disease-free, healthy life, here in reference to amla, a fruit, the Indian gooseberry, described as an Ayurvedic wonder. You hear a lot of that larger-than-life talk about amla coming out of Indian medical journals, who can forget amla, a wonderberry in the treatment and prevention of cancer. Amla is so revered that you find serious scientists at serious academic institutions and serious peer-reviewed medical journals, making statements like this. Every part of the Indian gooseberry plant has its unique therapeutic characteristic for the remedy of almost all the ailments and can be adopted as a bold italics single bullet against disease. OK then. I first ran across it in this famous article looking at the total antioxidant content of thousands of different foods. I did a series of videos about it ages ago, and to my surprise, the number one most antioxidant-packed single-hole food on the planet, on average, was amla, dried, powdered Indian gooseberries, beating out the prior heavyweight champion cloves with, just for comparison's sake, up to a hundred times or more antioxidants by weight than blueberries. So here's this fruit that has enjoyed a hallowed position in Ayurveda, the ancient system of medicine in India, so hallowed it was mythologically pegged as the first tree in the universe. So for thousands of years, before we even knew what an antioxidant was, they were revering this plant that just so happens to turn out to be the most antioxidant-packed fruit on the planet Earth. OK, you've got my attention, but I still need to see it put to the test. Well, indigenous tribal healers used amla to treat diabetes, so researchers decided to give it a try. This is the study that originally bowled me over. In fact, the subject of one of my first nutrition facts videos of all time over five years ago, the effect of amla fruit on the blood sugars and cholesterol levels of normal subjects and type 2 diabetic patients. In my video, I talked about the jaw-dropping effects of five cents worth of this powdered fruit, five pennies worth, compared to a diabetes drug. But what about the cholesterol effects? If you take healthy individuals and give them a placebo sugar pill, nothing much happens to their cholesterol. Ideally we want our total cholesterol under 150. This is a pretty healthy group. The average cholesterol in the U.S. is over 200, which is where the diabetics started out in this study. And when you give them placebo pills, nothing much happens either. But give people just about a half teaspoon of amla powder a day, not some extract or something, just dried Indian gooseberries, a powdered fruit, and this is what happens. That's like a 35, 40% drop in three weeks. Absolutely astounding. That's the kind of thing we see like, you know, six months after putting people on statin drugs. What we care about most is LDL, the so-called bad cholesterol, shooting for under at least 70, ideally. No impact to the placebo, but again, just about a half teaspoon of amla, which would cost about five cents a day. So like a buck-fifty a month, and boom! These results knocked my socks off. I mean, they're just unbelievable. That's why I was so excited after all these years to dig back into the amla literature to see if these findings had been confirmed or replicated elsewhere. So I typed amla into PubMed and waded through all the papers on using amla to decrease methane in cow farts and speed the growth of chickens. Or hey, what about amla ice cream? After all, amla is packed with fiber and phytonutrients. In contrast, ice cream is not. Therefore, and indeed, amla incorporated into ice cream increases the antioxidant capacity, though I would not recommend it for cholesterol lowering. Ah, but here we go, a comparative clinical study of amla head-to-head against the cholesterol-lowering statin drug, Simva statin, sold at Zocor, which I'll cover next.