Talk:Red yeast rice

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Changed mevastatin to lovastatin. Several sources said that Red yeast rice contained mevastatin, but the authorative ones said it was lovastatin. (including the citations already in place.) David.Throop 20:53, 14 February 2006 (UTC)

Contents 1 Merge 2 Red pickled tofu 3 Character 4 XueZhiKang

[edit] Merge

Proposal: Merge Red yeast rice into Monascus purpureus. Badagnani 22:53, 27 April 2006 (UTC)

Make M. purpureus a species page and move the rest of the info into RYR. Sjschen 22:56, 27 April 2006 (UTC)

I'm with Sjschen. MP and RYR are as different (and as similar) as oats and oatmeal. – David.Throop 03:26, 28 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Red pickled tofu

My jar of red pickled tofu says that the red coloring comes from jujubes. But the third link in this article says that it uses red yeast rice. Does anyone know if some red pickled tofu colored by red yeast rice? Badagnani 19:00, 29 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Character

Why does the middle character of the traditional name mean "yeast," but the middle character of the simplified name is an entirely different character (with the same pronunciation) meaning "crooked" or "sheet music"? Badagnani 19:04, 29 April 2006 (UTC)

This has much to do with the way chinese characters were simplified. The most commonly used words have a one-to-one trad->simp mapping. Less commonly used words (such as 麴) are either left the way it is or is are all mapped to one simple character. Thus a character like 曲 is used to write 麴 and thus in turn gains the additional definition of "yeast". As you can see herein lies one of the problems with SCCs.

On another note, the better translation of 麴 is more " fermenting stuff that grows on grain" rather than just "yeast", which in turn is usually called 酵母 (lit. mother of ferment). Interestingly 曲/麴 is also called 酒母 (lit. mother of wine/liquor) in chinese. Sjschen 01:26, 30 April 2006 (UTC)

Wow, heavy. This important stuff should be added to the Wiktionary articles for these characters. Not sure if you work there. Badagnani 03:21, 30 April 2006 (UTC)

Nope, feel free to C&P. Sjschen 03:45, 30 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] XueZhiKang

Please consider adding something similar to the following either in the opening paragraph or in the "Chinese medicine" section:

In China it is widely available as XueZhiKang 血脂康, and in Singapore it is available as Hypocol™.

--Ming