16 replies to this topic

[platypus]

What is your take of this? In ScienceMag of all places..:

 

http://blogs.science...waste-your-time

[pamojja]

The link doesn't open for me. Maybe it's because I'm in India, and they don't allow for such disinformation here

 

But I guess it's about the same story for which you have started now it's 3rd thread here at longecity, for example http://www.longecity...curcumin-a-hoax

[Oakman]

"It’s less than 1% bioavailable, and its half-life under physiological conditions is measured in minutes."

 

"Unfortunately, no form of curcumin, or its closely related analogues, appears to possess the properties required for a good drug candidate (chemical stability, high water solubility, potent and selective target activity, high bioavailability, broad tissue distribution, stable metabolism, and low toxicity)."

 

-----

 

As miniperspectives of studies must do, they are reviewing the past, not the present or possible future. Certainly, the point is well taken about formulations of Curcumin's poor bioavailability, including overhyped studies and nebulous results. But the raw interest in Curcumin over long periods of history indicates that there is something about Curcumin, however difficult to interpret, that has value.

 

The couple statements quoted above show that the reviewed Curcumin studies, are unfortunately out-dated, as newly available Curcumin formulations, such as the recently available UltraCur, offer far superior bioavailability, nearly 100% water solubility, with attainable blood serum levels of 600-1200 ng/mL, decreasing over 6-12 hr periods. Compared to the mentioned studies (less than 200 ng/mL serum levels, and typically much lower), this new compounds may finally expose the true nature of Curcumins efficacy. See this thread.

 

The miniperspective notes these problems, to its credit:

 

"The vast number of manuscripts published on the biological activity of curcumin makes it all but impossible for researchers to keep up with the state-of-the-art in the field."

 

"Of course, we do not rule out the possibility that an extract of crude turmeric might have beneficial effects on human health."

 

 

[Andey]

As I understand it, curcumin works on hormetic principle. Its slightly poisonous and force cells to activate preferable to host(us) genes profile.

From this perspective there is no need to flush body with large amounts of it. Its maybe could even became toxic.

 

[Kalliste]

 

Could turmeric really boost your health?

• 20 September 2016
• From the section Magazine

 

Bold health claims have been made for the power of turmeric. Is there anything in them, asks Michael Mosley.

Turmeric is a spice which in its raw form looks a bit like ginger root, but when it's ground down you get a distinctive yellowy orange powder that's very popular in South Asian cuisine. Until recently the place you would most likely encounter turmeric would be in chicken tikka masala, one of Britain's most popular dishes.

These days, thanks to claims that it can improve everything from allergies to depression, it's become incredibly trendy, not just cooked and sprinkled on food but added to drinks like tea. Turmeric latte anyone?

Now I'm usually very cynical about such claims, but in the case of turmeric I thought there could be something to it. There are at least 200 different compounds in turmeric, but there's one that scientists are particularly interested in. It gives this spice its colour. It's called curcumin.

Thousands of scientific papers have been published looking at turmeric and curcumin in the laboratory - some with promising results. But they've mainly been done in mice, using unrealistically high doses. There have been few experiments done in the real world, on humans.

Find out more    

• Michael Mosley is one of the presenters of Trust Me, I'm A Doctor, broadcast on Thursdays at 20:00 BST on BBC Two - catch up on BBC iPlayer

Find out more about the experiment

This is exactly the sort of situation where we on Trust Me like to make a difference. So we tracked down leading researchers from across the country and with their help recruited nearly 100 volunteers from the North East to do a novel experiment. Few of our volunteers ate foods containing turmeric on a regular basis.

Then we divided them into three groups.

We asked one group to consume a teaspoon of turmeric every day for six weeks, ideally mixed in with their food. Another group were asked to swallow a supplement containing the same amount of turmeric, and a third group were given a placebo, or dummy pill.

The volunteers who were asked to consume a teaspoon of turmeric a day were ingenious about what they added it to, mixing it with warm milk or adding it to yoghurt. Not everyone was enthusiastic about the taste, with comments ranging from "awful" to "very strong and lingering".

But what effect was eating turmeric having on them? We decided to try and find out using a novel test developed at University College, London, by Prof Martin Widschwendter and his team.

 Image copyright iStock

Prof Widschwendter is not particularly interested in turmeric but he is interested in how cancers start. His team have been comparing tissue samples taken from women with breast cancer and from women without it and they've found a change that happens to the DNA of cells well before they become cancerous.

The change is in the "packaging" of the genes. It's called DNA methylation. It's a bit like a dimmer switch that can turn the activity of the gene up or down.

The exciting thing is that if it is detected in time this change can, potentially, be reversed, before the cell turns cancerous. DNA methylation may explain why, for instance, your risk of developing lung cancer drops dramatically once you give up smoking. It could be that the unhealthy methylation of genes, caused by tobacco smoke, stops or reverses once you quit.

So we asked Prof Widschwendter whether testing the DNA methylation patterns of our volunteers' blood cells at the start and end of the experiment would reveal any change in their risk of cancer and other diseases, like allergies. It was something that had not been done before.

Turmeric  Image copyright Science Photo Library

• Perennial herbaceous plant native to South Asia
• Spice is gathered from the plants rhizomes (roots)
• As well as being used in Indian food, turmeric is used in traditional medicine and as a dyeing agent

Turmeric recipes from BBC Food

Fortunately he was very enthusiastic. "We were delighted," he said, "to be involved in this study, because it is a proof of principle study that opens entirely new windows of opportunity to really look into how we can predict preventive measures, particularly for cancer."

So what, if anything, happened?

When I asked him that, he pulled out his laptop and slowly began to speak.

"We didn't find any changes in the group taking the placebo," he told me. That was not surprising.

"The supplement group also didn't also show any difference," he went on.

That was surprising and somewhat disappointing.

"But the group who mixed turmeric powder into their food," he continued, "there we saw quite substantial changes. It was really exciting, to be honest. We found one particular gene which showed the biggest difference. And what's interesting is that we know this particular gene is involved in three specific diseases: depression, asthma and eczema, and cancer. This is a really striking finding."

 Image caption Turmeric has long been used in Indian food

It certainly is. But why did we see changes only in those eating turmeric, not in those taking the same amount as a supplement?

Dr Kirsten Brandt, who is a senior lecturer at Newcastle University and who helped run the experiment, thinks it may have something to do with the way the turmeric was consumed.

"It could be," she told me, "that adding fat or heating it up makes the active ingredients more soluble, which would make it easier for us to absorb the turmeric. It certainly gives us something, to work on, to try to find out exactly what's happening."

She also told me, because our volunteers all tried consuming their turmeric in different ways, that we can be confident it was the turmeric that was making the difference and not some other ingredient used to make, say, chicken tikka masala.

There is a lot more research that needs to be done, including repeating the experiment to see if these findings can be confirmed. But in light of what we've discovered will I be consuming more of the stuff? Probably. It helps that I like the taste and I've already begun experimenting with things like adding it with a touch of chilli to an omelette.

Michael Mosley will be doing a live Facebook Q&A session on Friday 23 September .What would you like to ask him?

Follow @BBCNewsMagazine on Twitter and on Facebook

 

Edited by Cosmicalstorm, 23 January 2017 - 09:12 PM.

[aconita]

Research, any kind of it, is expensive.

 

Don't be naive: nobody spend money if gets nothing out of it, usually profit makes for a good enough reason.

 

Natural compounds are cheap and their health benefits substantiated by hundreds if not thousands years of direct experience (with humans, not mice).

 

The industry lately shows great interest about natural compounds since finally realizes that old traditions likely do have some foundations, smart, isn't it?

 

But out of tradition is difficult to make any profit and more important is that out of natural compounds is very hard to make any substantial profit, which for the industry isn't good news, of course.

 

The solution is quite simple: identify one component out of the many (and usually mostly unknown) that looks like the main actor, isolate it, perform some study on it (usually on mice or fruit fly, if not in vitro) in order to support its effectiveness, ideally patent an extraction, isolation or delivery method (basically one of the only way to patent a natural compound...or to guarantee a nice profit out of it, as you wish to call it)...and launch it on the market with all the whistle and bells.

 

Unfortunately this procedures isn't dictated by optimization of health improvement effectiveness outcomes but by profit effectiveness outcome, the two not necessarily going well along each other.

 

Therefore we can see an absolutely inexpensive spice as turmeric which has been traditionally used for thousands of years for its health benefits turned in an expensive curcumin supplement business with very little if any sound research on humans behind it.

 

Turmeric is not curcumin, is much more than that and we are totally lost when it comes to components interaction, already wobbly on one single component but with very little clue when it comes to synergies of two, leave alone tens or hundreds.

 

This is a field research is still in it's infancy (unfortunately).

 

By the way oral turmeric has been traditionally used as a spice cooked with food and as first thing in the morning juice mixed with milk drink.

 

Both way providing fats along it in order to enhance bio-availability...and surprise surprise when a study is performed along those lines (as the one above) positive results do show indeed.

 

Not something the industry is going to be very happy about, I guess.

[Valijon]

This is exactly right. I wouldn't go throwing out those curcumin supplements just yet. I wouldn't be in any hurry to trust these people. Everyone is looking to patent something. I wouldn't trust a report from anyone who has a financial interest in discrediting any herbs or amino acids etc.

If something comes to market, I would steer people away from it and back to say curcumin with black pepper.

[platypus]

How about this claim in the blog-post? 

 

 

The authors of the current paper, indeed, state that “To our knowledge, (it) has never been shown to be conclusively effective in a randomized, placebo-controlled clinical trial for any indication“.

 

 

 

[Valijon]

To their knowledge is the key here.They should keep seeking information.

[platypus]

I'm sure they tried. Are there any such well-designed studies out there? Perhaps in India?

[Oakman]

I'm sure they tried. Are there any such well-designed studies out there? Perhaps in India?

 

 

Try this Google Scholar link > https://scholar.goog...dt=0,6&as_vis=1

 

Seems the best place to find any positive results, the link is the search for "Curcumin Randomized placebo controlled clinical trials".

[pamojja]

The link doesn't open for me. Maybe it's because I'm in India, and they don't allow for such disinformation here
 
But I guess it's about the same story for which you have started now it's 3rd thread here at longecity, for example http://www.longecity...curcumin-a-hoax

 
Think joelcairo did a pretty thorough review of that study on that other thread:
 

I just got hold of the full paper through sci-hub. What I thought was going to be some kind of meta-analysis is nothing of the kind. It's merely an extended diatribe, full of unsupported assertions and predictions. (Spoiler alert: all the ongoing clinical trials are going to be unsuccessful.)
 
The promise of evaluating 120+ clinical studies evaporated when the vast majority have not been completed or published their results. Analyzing the results of the rest was "beyond the scope" of this paper, so 4 (four) studies were summarized instead, with the promise that these are typical of all the rest. All of these studies were underpowered, both in terms of participants and dosage, so it's not surprising not much was proven.
 
The greatest single complain the authors have about curcumin is the lack of bioavailability. In fact almost the entire basis of their skepticism seems to be that the apparent bioavailability of curcumin is so low that it cannot have any significant effect, and therefore the health claims can be dismissed out of hand. I think this reasoning is false for several reasons...
 
1. It's extremely difficult to measure the plasma levels of all the different types of curcumin and their metabolites. My personal belief is that curcumin's true bioavailability is higher than believed. Anecdotally, when I began taking a couple of grams of plain curcumin a day, after exercising I found that my socks had a slight yellow tinge to them. It took me some time to realize that I was probably sweating out small amounts of curcumin, which is an intense yellow dye. I looked this up online and found other reports of the same thing happening. I'm open to other explanations, but something like this was definitely happening.
 
2. The authors are ignoring the effect of small amounts of curcumin on the system over the long term. One of the studies discussed lasted only 30 days. I feel that expecting precancerous lesions of smokers to be reversed by curcumin over 30 days is asking unreasonably much.
 
3. Enhanced bioavailability formulations of curcumin are already cheap and widely available, yet with all the complaints about low absorption and rapid breakdown, virtually the only discussion of them is this: "Delivery systems such as lipid vesicles, nanoparticles, and nanofibers might be able to boost the bioavailability of [curcumin], but this could also conceivably narrow its therapeutic window and lead to off-target toxicity by aforementioned processes." [Note the word "conceivably".]
 
Finally, I expected them to fail to back up their claim of "false activity:  of curcumin in vivo, and I was not disappointed. In fact, in vivo research is hardly mentioned. The only "false activity" I could imagine they are referring to is if the result of the test is successful, but the immediate cause was slightly different (for example, a combination of curcuminoids, or a metabolite of curcuminoids) or the mechanism is different from what is expected. This sort of thing seems completely beside the point. A successful study is a successful study, then you can work backwards to figure out why it works.

[Oakman]

Food for thought  > http://nutritionfact...o-low-in-india/

 

It is estimated that many tumors start around the age of 20. However, detection of cancer is normally around the age of 50 or later. Thus, it takes cancer decades to incubate. Why does it take so long? Recent studies indicate that in any given type of cancer, hundreds of different genes must be modified to change a normal cell into a cancer cell. Although cancers are characterized by the dysregulation of cell signaling pathways at multiple steps, most current anticancer therapies involve the modulation of a single target. Chemotherapy has gotten incredibly specific, but the ineffectiveness, lack of safety, and high cost of these monotargeted therapies has led to real disappointment, and drug companies are now trying to develop chemo drugs that take a multitargeted approach.

 

Many plant-based products, however, accomplish multitargeting naturally and are inexpensive and safe compared to drugs. However, because drug companies are not usually able to secure intellectual property rights to plants, the development of plant-based anticancer therapies has not been prioritized. They may work (and work better for all we know), and they may be safer, or even fully risk free.

 

If we were going to choose one plant-based product to start testing, we might choose curcumin, the pigment in the spice turmeric (the reason curry powder looks yellow). Before we start throwing money at research, we might want to ask some basic questions, like “Do populations that eat a lot of turmeric have lower cancer rates?” The incidence of cancer does appear to be significantly lower in regions where turmeric is heavily consumed. Population-based data indicate that some extremely common cancers in the Western world are much less prevalent in regions where turmeric is widely consumed in the diet.

 

For example, “overall cancer rates are much lower in India than in western countries.”  U.S. men get 23 times more prostate cancer than men in India. Americans get between 8 and 14 times the rate of melanoma, 10 to 11 times more colorectal cancer, 9 times more endometrial cancer, 7 to 17 times more lung cancer, 7 to 8 times more bladder cancer, 5 times more breast cancer, and 9 to 12 times more kidney cancer. This is not mere 5, 10, or 20 percent more, but 5, 10, or 20 times more. Hundreds of percent more breast cancer, thousands of percent more prostate cancer—differences even greater than some of those found in the China Study.

 

The researchers in this study, highlighted in my video Back to Our Roots: Curry and Cancer, conclude: “Because Indians account for one-sixth of the world’s population, and have some of the highest spice consumption in the world, epidemiological studies in this country have great potential for improving our understanding of the relationship between diet and cancer. The lower rates of cancer may, of course, not be due to higher spice intake. Several dietary factors may contribute to the low overall rate of cancer in India. Among them are a “relatively low intake of meat and a mostly plant-based diet, in addition to the high intake of spices.” Forty percent of Indians are vegetarians, and even the ones that do eat meat don’t eat a lot. And it’s not only what they don’t eat, but what they do. India is one of the largest producers and consumers of fresh fruits and vegetables, and Indians eat a lot of pulses (legumes), such as beans, chickpeas, and lentils. They also eat a wide variety of spices in addition to turmeric that constitute, by weight, the most antioxidant-packed class of foods in the world.

 

Population studies can’t prove a correlation between dietary turmeric and decreased cancer risk, but they can certainly inspire a bunch of research. So far, curcumin has been tested against a variety of human cancers, including colorectal cancer, pancreatic cancer, breast, prostate, multiple myeloma, lung cancer, and head and neck cancer, for both prevention and treatment. For more information on turmeric and curcumin, check out Carcinogen Blocking Effects of Turmeric Curcumin and Turmeric Curcumin Reprogramming Cancer Cell Death.

Edited by Oakman, 24 January 2017 - 06:57 PM.

[aconita]

...and Indians don't eat curcumin but turmeric.

 

The engine might be the main responsible for a car to move but an engine alone goes nowhere, many more components are needed to make a car...yes, some are not essential and even in the way but still many are required.

 

In wine is the alcohol that makes one drunk but not all wines of the same alcohol content lead to the same kind of drunkenness.

 

In marijuana THC is said to be responsible for the high but every strain of marijuana provide a different high.

 

Interactions and synergies.

[Captain Obvious]

"Natural compounds are cheap and their health benefits substantiated by hundreds if not thousands years of direct experience"

 

Aka the naturalistic fallacy. 

 

 

Acupuncture is also "substantiated" by hundreds or thousands of years of direct experience, but for some reason science shows it's no better than sham acupuncture or placebo.

Edited by Captain Obvious, 19 March 2017 - 06:30 PM.

[Exception]

Curcumin isn't bioavailable on it's own?

 

No it's not that's why you take a bioavailable formulation or take it with piprine.

[Dorian Grey]

499 pages, with 20 studies per page on curcumin in PubMed. 

 

https://www.ncbi.nlm.../?term=curcumin

 

I'm not too good at math, but this looks like nearly 10,000 papers on the subject over the last half century or so?

 

If curcumin is indeed a useless supplement, this would be one of the largest wild goose chases in medical history.  

 

Pardon me, but it's time for my evening dose.