Curcumin or Cure-Cumin? Antioxidant in Turmeric Is Amazingly Useful

The curry spice pigment curcumin is often described as a "cure-cumin." Just about any illness, its more fervent advocates will tell you, can be cured with curcumin. The truth is that curcumin is in fact very helpful in many health conditions. It's not appropriate for everyone and in every situation, however, and different forms of curcumin work in different ways in the body.

What Is Curcumin?

There tends to be some confusion among curcumin, turmeric, and curry. It probably helps to consider them in reverse order. Curry is a spicy sauce. It's practically a national dish of the United Kingdom, and it is popular throughout South and Southeast Asia and around the world.

Curcumin is the antioxidant component of turmeric that gives the spice its orange-yellow color. There is so much curcumin in turmeric (it comprises as much as four percent of the weight of the spice) that commercial transportation of turmeric poses some special problems. When spice exporters tried irradiating turmeric so it would not grow weevils and mites during storage, the product got weevils and mites anyway. The tiny bugs simply ate turmeric and developed resistance to radiation. For this reason, turmeric tends to be an "organic" product in the spice trade.

What Does Curcumin Do?

Medical researchers first became interested in curry, rather than turmeric or curcumin, when they noticed that women in Trinidad and Tobago, where curry is a popular food, developed breast cancer at a much more lower rate than women in the United States. Epidemiological researchers then noticed that rates of almost all kinds of cancer, even allowing for differences in diagnostic practices, are drastically less common in India than in the United States. India is another nation where curries are consumed commonly.

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It took years of research to determine that the herb in curry that makes the difference is turmeric, and that the component of turmeric that makes the difference is curcumin. Then it took two decades of laboratory work and clinical trials to establish that curcumin stimulates the healing process, rather than that healthy people consume curcumin. Once that was established, however, the results began to pile up. Here are just a few of dozens of findings from over 2,000 studies.

• Consuming just 80 mg of curcumin per day (about 1/5 of the amount in a typical curcumin supplment, or the amount in a serving of curry) lowers triglyceride levels in just 30 days.
• Consuming just 80 mg of curcumin per day starts a process through which the brain "untangles" the deformed proteins associated with Alzheimer's disease.
• Curcumin stops the development of nearly every kind of cancer at nearly every stage of carcinogenesis and tumor development (although it is not protective against stomach cancers and one clinical study found that it may be detrimental in the third stage of colon cancer).
• Curcumin is one of the few agents, natural or pharmaceutical, that can stimulate the body's natural healing processes to lower dangerously high iron levels.

How to Use Curcumin Effectively

The benefits of curcumin are not limited to supporting remission from cancer, enhancing brain health, protecting the heart, and lowering iron levels. Curcumin has also been found to be helpful in conditions as diverse as diabetes and brain aneurysms.

Continuing the list, the benefits of curcumin include:

• As mentioned above, protecting against brain aneurysms. Higher levels of curcumin in the bloodstream are associated with higher production of an enzyme called plasma catalase. This enzyme protects against the formation of potentially fatal aneurysms in the brain. I am extremely familiar with this effect. I have a brain aneurysm myself. It has been stable since I have been taking curcumin.
• Curcumin helps the body fight infections of bacteria that have tough outer walls, such as staph and strep.
• Curcumin creams help lighten age spots and smooth out wrinkles. It's important to buy a product that is packaged in a tube, not a jar, so the antioxidant power of the curcumin in the cream is not spent fighting oxidation from exposure to the air.
• Curcumin lowers the production of another enzyme in saliva called amylase. This enzyme breaks down starch into sugar. When you have less amylase in your saliva, you have less sugar in your mouth. Your digestive tract has to work just a little harder to release it from starchy foods, your blood sugar levels don't go up and then down as abruptly, and you may have just a little less risk of tooth decay.
• Curcumin reduces inflammation. It helps relieve joint pain. It also slightly relieves accumulation of fluid in fatty tissue, maybe enough to make a difference of a pound or two (up to about 1 kilo) in your weight.

It simply helps your body finish the job of healing that your own good health practices, your own good diet, and medical intervention start. Moreover, not every curcumin product is appropriate for every health goal. Here are some important distintions.

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• If you are especially interested in using curcumin for brain health, you will get the best results from a kind of curcumin sold commercially as Longvida. Developed by doctors at Ohio State University, this product bonds curcumin to a fatty acid. The fatty acid helps it slip past the liver and keeps the curcumin in its original, natural form. It is much easier for the brain to absorb curcumin when it hasn't been chemically changed by the liver. Longvida is found in product sold in the EU under the brand name Nutrivene and in the US under the brand name NOW Foods.
• Curcumin is not a good idea if you suffer iron-deficiency anemia. That is because it activates a gene that codes a protein that literally sucks iron out of the bloodstream. For many people, lowering iron levels is actually a good thing. People who have hereditary chromatosis or beta-thalassemia may find that curcumin is a useful alternative to much more expensive chelation therapies and blood donation. However, if you are anemic, don't take curcumin or turmeric.
• Curcumin is useful in almost every situation a cancer patient may face, except in advanced colon cancer. Curcumin does not cure cancer, but there is solid evidence from clinical trials at Baylor Medical School that it prolongs survival, and it may make it possible to beat cancer with fewer toxic drugs.