Red yeast rice

Red yeast rice
Wet rice cultivated with the mold species Monascus purpureus turns red; the rice when dried is called red yeast rice.
Chinese name
Traditional Chinese	紅麴米
Simplified Chinese	红曲米
Literal meaning	red yeast rice
Transcriptions Standard Mandarin Hanyu Pinyin hóng qū mǐ Yue: Cantonese Jyutping hung4 kuk1 mai5 Southern Min Hokkien POJ âng-khak-bí
Japanese name
Hiragana	べにこうじ
Transcriptions Romanization benikōji

Red yeast rice or red rice koji is a bright reddish purple fermented rice, which acquires its color from being cultivated with the mold Monascus purpureus. Red yeast rice is what is referred to as a kōji in Japanese, meaning "grain or bean overgrown with a mold culture", a food preparation tradition going back to ca. 300 BC.^[1]

In addition to its culinary use, red yeast rice is also used in Chinese herbology and Traditional Chinese medicine, possibly during the Tang dynasty around AD 800. Red yeast rice is described in the Chinese pharmacopoeia Ben Cao Gang Mu by Li Shizhen.^[2][3]

A modern-era use as a dietary supplement developed in the late 1970s after researchers were isolating lovastatin from Aspergillus and monacolins from Monascus, the latter being the same fungus used to make red yeast rice. Chemical analysis soon showed that lovastatin and monacolin K were identical. Lovastatin became the patented prescription drug Mevacor.^[4] Red yeast rice went on to become a non-prescription dietary supplement in the United States and other countries. In 1998, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) initiated action to ban a dietary supplement containing red yeast rice extract, stating that red yeast rice products containing monacolin K are identical to a prescription drug, and thus subject to regulation as a drug.^[5]