PrepperMed 101: Turmeric As An Anti-Inflammatory

Now and again the ‘health crowd’ proclaims a new darling, ‘superfood’ that’s equal parts food and medicine. It’s touted as a cure for everything from asthma to zits. After the hype comes the research. Usually that’s where the new giant shrinks back down to ‘good food’ size. Today’s post is about a superfood that’s holding its own very well under scientific scrutiny. Enter that pretty yellow powder that helps make Indian food a delight: Turmeric.

If you collect and dry the roots and rhizomes of the plant Curcuma longa, you get turmeric. Add some other Indian spices, and you have curry.

Is turmeric herbal medicine or just good food?

What’s the difference? In my mind, an herbal medicine needs two things.

First it has to have chemical agents that have properties useful for human health. In turmeric, there are several such compounds. Curcumins, the compounds that make the spice yellow, are cast in the starring role.

Second, and more rare by a long shot, is evidence that the compounds provide value in actual humans (not only lab dishes) after being prepared in a way that normal people can manage. Lots of chemicals do neat things in lab tests, but for whatever reason fail when the testing goes into clinical trials. Turmeric and its main component curcumin are holding up surprisingly well.

Moreover, turmeric is ground roots and rhizomes. Rhizomes are the little nodules, essentially condominiums for valuable species of bacteria, that are associated with many plant roots. A good proportion of the Curcuma plant’s mass can be converted into turmeric. That turmeric makes a good spice or can be taken as a supplement…and it still works.

Turmeric is anti-inflammatory

The main role of turmeric as an herbal medicine seems to be as an anti-inflammatory.  Whenever tissue is damaged or invaders detected, the immune system triggers inflammation. Blood vessels leak clear fluid (the stuff you find in blisters) to cause swelling, blood flow increases, immune cells get aggressive and kill things. The good news is, this inflammation combats infections — that’s why the system is there. 

The bad news is that immune cells do not value moderation. Once triggered, their cascade of reactions damages lots of things. The military would call it ‘collateral damage’. Excessive inflammation causes much of the pain and destruction associated with a wide variety of disorders. It’s very useful to rein in excess inflammation. 

Turmeric helps dampen inflammation by interrupting the production of several of the signaling chemicals the immune cells use to psyche themselves up. (2) It also is an antioxidant, and much of the damage of inflammation comes through oxidation reactions. 

Some conditions for which turmeric has shown value

I literally read some sources that claimed turmeric was good for Everything!! But, those were lousy sources. You don’t have to read a lot of medical research to figure out that not everything that works in a lab dish actually pans out in real people. Here are some things I found quality evidence to support. I define ‘quality evidence’ here as trials with good control groups in actual human beings; in reports found in reputable peer-reviewed journals.

The turmeric or curcumin supplements also had to be fed at reasonable levels. Levels you could get from eating a lot of curry or popping a few capsules a day, ok. If you’d have to eat a plateful of the stuff or super-concentrate it to get the effect, I judged it ‘not quality evidence’ for a prepper’s uses.

People with arthritis suffered less pain and mobility loss when they took turmeric. (2) Cognitive decline was slower in heavy curry eaters. (3) Specifically, attention and working memory were improved in older individuals in response to supplementation.(5) LDL (“bad”) cholesterol levels dropped with curcumin supplementation. (4) Diabetics see their blood glucose levels drop. (7)

That’s just a sampling. Very many conditions include excess inflammation, and turmeric has shown helpful in quite a few. (6) It’s even been useful as an adjunct in cancer therapy. I didn’t see claims of cancer being cured; but did see reports of it being slowed or developing fewer ancillary symptoms.

What are turmeric’s downsides?

Any chemical potent enough to be an effective medicine is potent enough to be harmful. Fortunately, turmeric’s safety profile is really very nice. Those who don’t react well to spicy foods might get an upset stomach or acid reflux, but those problems are easily identified and stopped by stopping the turmeric. Most people tolerate really high doses with no trouble.

Other than that, the only thing I saw as a health concern was that high doses of the potent supplement forms of curcumin could interact badly with the so-called ‘blood thinners’. These are actually anti-coagulant drugs, and include things like warfarin and, more weakly, anti-inflammatory painkiller drugs like ibuprofen and aspirin. Specifically, curcumin ups the bleeding time after injury. I am not a physician, so I’m not going to recommend what you do one way or another.  If *I* was on a blood thinner I’d probably pass on the curcumin.

The biggest drawback of turmeric is its low bio-availability. Much of what you eat goes out the other end. Just how much? It depends on the gut in question, and what you eat it with. The active curcumins are lipids, so eating some other lipid with it helps. That’s way more pleasant than it sounds; it just means there has to be some fat in the food. The supplements are more effective for getting the active compound absorbed than the powdered spice, as the supplements are designed for good absorption.  

It also metabolizes pretty quickly once absorbed. You’d have to keep taking it to expect effects to persist.

Is turmeric a prep?

Turmeric is well recognized as anti-inflammatory, but I put off writing about it for years. Why? Because it’s native to India, and few of the plants of India grow in the climates of most of our readers. Not being able to grow your own in quantity seriously dampens the usefulness of any herb as a prep.

Sure, you can store some supplement capsules. I’d for sure keep them dark. Colored compounds like the yellow curcurmins break down much more rapidly in the light. Protection from extreme temperatures (cold being better than hot), humidity, and oxygen exposure extends shelf life. I could not find turmeric-specific suggestions, but the standard story for herbal supplements is that they hold value for a couple of years with reasonable storage.

Grow your own turmeric

But wait! It turns out Curcuma longa, the source of turmeric, will grow in temperate climates with a little extra care. These suggestions come from Plant Delights Nursery. (1) I haven’t had a chance to try them yet.

You’d have to grow a lot of it, since the studies that show good effects feed at least 1.5 gram of ground dried root and rhizome per day. (I’d guesstimate that to be about a heaping tablespoon’s worth.) Less might help too, but of course probably not as much.

Curcuma likes well-drained, organically-rich, slightly acidic soil. It prefers some sun, but will do with good indirect light. Since it’s from India, it’s used to monsoon and dry seasons. Summer is closest to monsoon season, so it likes to be wet in the summer. Winter corresponds to the dry season. The British nursery I got this information from lets it stay outside in the winter, but their winters are fairly mild. They suggest if the ground’s going to freeze, you lift the roots and rhizomes (those are the little nodules on the roots; they house friendly bacteria) and store them in sawdust or peat moss, moist, where they won’t freeze.

Don’t give up on Curcuma if it’s late to come up in the spring. The tops die back in cold weather but the roots send up new shoots later than most other plants. The flowers are pretty and exotic-looking and arrive mid-fall.

A caution

Not everybody agrees turmeric is All That. One group of chemists has in fact argued that its apparent benefits come largely from its ability to interfere with chemical assays of its abilities. (8) They didn’t convince me, given that a lot of the research I looked at did not depend on those assays — but it’s a caution worth mentioning nevertheless. I came away from the research thinking turmeric probably is helpful for a number of conditions, but not a game-changer in anything. If I had a chronic inflammatory disease, I’d be more excited about it. Is it worth it to you? Is it worth at least exploring to you? Salty and I have started experimenting with the supplements to see if they seem to be helpful for the garden variety joint aches, injury recoveries etc. we have from time to time.

References

1) Curcurma longa — grow turmeric in your garden. (2019) Plant Delights Nursery, Inc.https://www.plantdelights.com/blogs/articles/curcuma-longa-turmeric-plant-zedoaria-ginger

2) Chin K. Y. (2016). The spice for joint inflammation: anti-inflammatory role of curcumin in treating osteoarthritis. Drug design, development and therapy, 10, 3029-3042. doi:10.2147/DDDT.S117432

3) Ng TP, Chiam PC, Lee T, Chua HC, Lim L, Kua EH. Curry consumption and cognitive function in the elderly. Am J Epidemiol. 2006 Nov 1;164(9):898-906. Epub 2006 Jul 26.

4) Jessica Jayne Anne Ferguson, Elizabeth Stojanovski, Lesley MacDonald-Wicks, Manohar Lal Garg. 2017. Lipid-Lowering Potential of Combined Phytosterols and Curcumin Supplementation in Hypercholesterolaemic Individuals. FASEB Journal 31:1.

5) Cox KH, Pipingas A, Scholey AB. Investigation of the effects of solid lipid curcumin on cognition and mood in a healthy older population. J Psychopharmacol. 2015 May;29(5):642-51. doi: 10.1177/0269881114552744. Epub 2014 Oct 2.

6) Gupta, S. C., Patchva, S., & Aggarwal, B. B. (2012). Therapeutic roles of curcumin: lessons learned from clinical trials. The AAPS journal, 15(1), 195-218.

7) Srinivasan M. Effect of curcumin on blood sugar as seen in a diabetic subject. Indian J Med Sci. 1972;26(4):269–270

8) Kathryn M. Nelson, Jayme L. Dahlin, Jonathan Bisson, James Graham, Guido F. Pauli, and Michael A. Walters. The Essential Medicinal Chemistry of Curcumin. Journal of Medicinal Chemistry 2017 60 (5), 1620-1637. DOI: 10.1021/acs.jmedchem.6b00975