Jiaogulan (Gynostemma pentaphyllum) is a traditional Vietnamese herb, drunk as a tea or taken as an extract for blood sugar and cholesterol. The evidence is small trials and a review rated mostly very low to low certainty.
Also known as: Gynostemma pentaphyllum, gynostemma, southern ginseng, gypenosides.
A Vietnamese trial gave 6 g of jiaogulan tea a day for 12 weeks (Huyen 2010). These are study protocols, not a recommendation.
It is sold in the US as a dietary supplement. Under the 1994 dietary supplement law (DSHEA), FDA does not approve dietary supplements before they are marketed, and the maker, not FDA, is responsible for safety and labeling.
What studies show: in a 12-week trial in 24 people with newly diagnosed type 2 diabetes not on medication, fasting blood sugar fell by 3.0 mmol/L on jiaogulan tea versus 0.6 on placebo tea, and HbA1c by about 2 percentage points versus 0.2 (Huyen 2010). A 2022 review of 22 trials (2,407 people with abnormal blood lipids) found very low-certainty evidence that its effects on cholesterol and triglycerides were similar to lipid-lowering drugs, and low-certainty evidence that red yeast rice worked better (Dai 2022).
Safety: the diabetes trial found no low blood sugar episodes and no kidney, liver or gut problems (Huyen 2010). The review found fewer side effects than with lipid-lowering drugs and said use for more than 8 weeks appears safe (Dai 2022).
We could not find a single published half-life or time to peak for jiaogulan that applies to a supplement dose, so we do not list one. Plant extracts are mixtures of many compounds, so no single figure would describe them.
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