Do turmeric and curcumin have any actual health benefits?
newscientist.comIf turmeric had health benefits, we would expect India to be the world leader in that particular benefit. There are so few areas in which India is a leader that the answer is obviously no.
Like I get that turmeric is exotic and that a lot of non-Indians take turmeric pills and supplements, but Indian food has tons of turmeric as a normal ingredient. We would go through bottles and bags of the stuff like nothing. I don't understand these supplements and the treatment of turmeric as a medicine. Some supplements even tell you to talk to your doctor before eating turmeric! That's crazy. What next, talk to your therapist before taking garlic?
Culinary turmeric is about ~3% curcuminoids by weight (and only 60-70% of that is curcumin specifically). Curcumin also has low oral bioavailability, typically offset by taking a large dose (1000mg) and combining with piperine - even ignoring the piperine, that 1g of curcumin amounts of 66g of turmeric.
The average Indian household does not use 60g of turmeric per person per day. More like 1.5-2g per person per day, or ~30mg of curcumin, and without much to improve absorption.
Curcumin can, in fact, interact with anticoagulants and affect iron absorption at high supplemental doses, which is not a concern at culinary amounts.
There are reasons to be skeptical of the clinical evidence for curcumin supplementation, but "the heterogenous population of India isn't experiencing widespread miracle cures from culinary turmeric" is not one of them.
(And yes, garlic extract is also a thing, also extremely concentrated compared to eating whole garlics or seasoning with garlic powder, and has antiplatelet/anticoagulant activity that one should be aware of before taking such supplements)
Like so many things, it may even be backwards: https://www.consumerreports.org/health/food-safety/your-herb...
Like so many of CR's nutrition articles in the past few years, the test methodology and standards applied (see https://article.images.consumerreports.org/prod/content/dam/... and https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7509468/ ) are flawed and the conclusions are overblown.
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7045a4.htm but not done for no reason
Somewhat useless article. To summarize, we have anecdotes suggesting they may work but no one has figured out how to prove or disprove it in a study, and the author has some doubts. Meanwhile supplements can be dangerous if you take too much or have a liver condition, or if you buy them from an unreputable source, as with every other substance on earth. Author confirms it tastes good in milk.
Not useless if it pinpointed that most of the foundational research papers that initiated this trend were of dubious intellectual integrity- i.e. the source was compromised
I recently went into a few European pharmacies trying to find any that still stock cough lollies with DXM and found that Icelandic moss seems to be the currently in-fashion health woo-woo. Presumably because freighting it in from Iceland rather than ripping it off the tree in your back yard gives it magical healing properties.
based on multiple personal experiences, and that of friends/acquaintances, I have no doubt it works for reduction of inflammation of the sort you get spraining you ankle.
must be taken with pepper extract to increase bio availability, I buy it ready to go from the supermarket where they keep it with the vitamins and supplements.
just because no one has worked out how, does not mean it is ineffective.
I has tennis elbow a while ago. Was going to see the doctor but there was a wait. Looked up natural antiinflamatories. Turmeric came up. Did turmeric and black pepper milkshakes for a week and it fixed it.
I hear you. The problem is... It might have just gotten better by itself. Hard to know.
Maybe.
Or the turmeric did nothing and it fixed itself the way the vast majority of injuries heal.
Turmeric always does something.
Whether it’s enough to make a difference in your case depends.
The problem is that this is either unsupported by evidence or a meaninglessly shallow claim. After all, almost every herbal remedy does something, but it doesn't mean it's actually therapeutic for some given condition.
The problem is, you’re out of date regarding the recent efforts put into studying and documenting long-known herbs.
Curcumin is a polyphenol that operates at the molecular level to disrupt multiple inflammatory cascades. It achieves this by simultaneously blocking the transcription of inflammatory genes and interrupting the enzymes responsible for generating pain and swelling.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10111629/
I’ve got a couple other examples I’ve come across recently that I can additionally share.
That paper is co-authored by Bharat B. Aggarwal, who has been found to produce fraudulent research [1], and many of whose papers have been retracted. This is the guy mentioned in the New Scientist article!
Curcumin has been extensively studied, and a common observation is that it is fantastically bioactive in vitro, but tends to have zero meaningful properties when introduced into the biology of a real human being. Researchers have categorized it as an IMPS (invalid metabolic panacea), i.e. a drug whose chemical properties are an illusion, and has ended up becoming a "black hole" for scientific funding [2] [3].
The part about how it "disrupts multiple inflammatory cascades" and so on sounds terrific until you realize these are behaviours observed in vitro. The fact is that curcumin is unstable and highly reactive, so it gets torn apart and neutralized early during digestion, leading to insanely low bioavailability. Tons of compounds are anti-inflammatory in vitro. Very few actually are in the human body.
[1] https://reeserichardson.blog/2024/01/30/the-king-of-curcumin...
Are you sure that means this particular paper is bad?
Fair point, though. Good news, lots of others:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9881416/#S9
https://lpi.oregonstate.edu/mic/dietary-factors/phytochemica...
Also curious how many of those detracting have observed the use of capsules,
or the difference in a person not making proper gut acids / liver function.
One problem is: a tennis elbow does not really involve inflammation... Look it up.
I did, it says it sometimes involves inflammation, but it was self diagnosed anyway.Either way I drank turmeric milkshakes and it went away. Maybe by itself, maybe because of the turmeric.
Good thing it did, I've been struggling with it for 9 months now. I'm seeing a new specialist next week.
How long had the problem persisted before you considered going to the doctor?
Probably a bit over a week. Twinged after kayaking at the weekend. Got worse the following weekend and wasn't going away.
The mind-body connection is also real.
Yes, next question