The Science Behind Turmeric

Transcript

hi everyone welcome back to my youtube channel for those of you who are new here my name is dr. Madani I'm an accredited practicing dietitian and a nutrition educator and today's video we're going to be talking about the science behind turmeric so with this science behind series my aim is to critically evaluate the literature around particular nutrition topics I'm trying really hard to set aside any personal biases that I do have and just to look at the literature as it is I feel like a lot of nutrition advice that's being dished out is given by people who haven't had a look at the literature by themselves or have a preconceived notion of what they believe to be true or have a financial incentive and I'm trying really hard to make this something that's not bias and a discussion of the literature around to rank so it's claimed that the active ingredient turmeric curcumin has all these amazing properties to it it's described as being an t ox an antioxidant as being anti-inflammatory anti-cancerous acting malarial anti-diabetic like pretty much every health claim that could ever be made about a food product has been made about turmeric and so today I really want to look at the literature behind if any of this is true and how we can use this in practice all of the literature that I'm using today is gonna be linked in the description box below and I recommend you to read some stuff by yourself too if this is something that is interesting to you so one of the biggest studies that's being done on curcumin was a 2016 systematic review and meta-analysis that looked at the way that curcumin could affect people with rheumatoid arthritis and so they dosed people with so these are C T's dose people with about a thousand milligrams of curcumin per day and saw like how it affected their pain and inflammation and the studies all found basically that curcumin was effective in reducing inflammation and there were pain it's really cool because they actually found that um the the pain was reduced to the same amount as taking an ibuprofen which is a medicate on the market for pain medication and the cool thing too is that taking curcumin doesn't have any of the side effects that taking painkillers does and so it's an effective painkiller without the negative side effects taking a painkiller comes with and so the way that this works is that the Kirkman will interact with the inflammatory markers into blood and thereby reducing their effect in the body and this lower inflammation then reduces the amount of pain that people feel with arthritis and so similar to this there was another very thorough review that was conducted looking at the other health benefits of curcumin that goes beyond an ting inflammation so they looked at its effect on diabetes on Aging on skin health on cancer just like basically everything and they found that turmeric actually did have all of these different health benefits because curcumin gets involved in so many different biological pathways in the body and so can have lots of different benefits to the body beyond just being an anti-inflammatory and so all of this sounds great but there are a couple of catches so first of all pretty much every single study that the curcumin is using has very low sample sizes and so the validity of the studies is for question but more importantly the thing to consider is that the way they use kirkman in two studies is that they use high doses that I use about a thousand milligrams of curcumin in the studies and not only that but they they treat the curcumin in a way that it's digested into the body and absorbed into the tissues so if you're just having normal curcumin that comes from the turmeric it's not as bioavailable which means that you're consuming it where your body doesn't actually absorb very much of it at all so in order for us to get a thousand milligrams of curcumin which is the levels that they do in do studies to show how effective it is in having health benefits we need to have about 25 grams of turmeric because kirkman only about like two to six percent of the full turmeric and then of course we have to bear in mind that the curcumin will have very low bioavailability and several studies have reported that curcumin concentrations are extremely low or non-existent in serum and tissues at one two three and four hours after taking a single dose of 500 to 8,000 milligrams in human so basically what this means is that even if we do have eight thousand milligrams of curcumin which is God knows how much turmeric we're not gonna see those levels reflected in our tissues or a serum because it just doesn't absorb very well without being treated first that just goes to show how terrible the bioavailability of curcumin if when it comes from a natural food source and so basically there is a really good evidence to show that curcumin could have potential health benefits it could be an unconformity in fact it seems like it really is it could be aunty cancers Antioch have antioxidant properties all sorts of things but only if it's using a drug like way where it's treated for bioavailability and it's taken as super high doses for long for a long term period so you have to take it every single day about thousand milligrams that it's highly violent bioavailable and then yes you will see health benefits but when it comes to eating food just eating turmeric may not have those effects in fact even if we are thinking about having turmeric as a kind of like a health food we're gonna have to eat back 25 grams of it per day and even then consider its bioavailability which is seems to be terrible and so realistically in practice instead of putting all this effort into eating 25 grams of to record a which is five teaspoons of turmeric every single day bear in mind that any people are the ones who eat the most to make in the world and they also only average about 2.5 grounds of turmeric every day and so I say to probably just focus on eating a healthy varied diet that's high in fruits and now this advice is not at all trendy nor is it exciting but it's just the real advice I can give you there are thousands and thousands of studies that show how eating a diet that's rich in fruits and vegetables have all these effects - they are antioxidants and anti-inflammatory and anti-cancer as' and all the good stuff it's just that no one really likes eating vegetables and asking turmeric to do the job seems to be more fun than eating your [ __ ] vegetables I do want to say though that if you are experiencing room through an arthritis then perhaps getting curcumin that has high bioavailability might be something for you to consider it has been shown to be a guide of pain medication and if your pain medication is causing you some severe side effects it might be something for you to consider but for those of us who don't have arthritis I say you know help you diet have your fruits and your vegetables I really hope you enjoyed this video looking into the science behind it to rank please do leave a comment down below if there are other things you want the science behind explained about if you have not subscribed to my channel please be sure to and we'll have a lot of fun together so talk to for now see you in my next video