Saturday 8 October 2016

Tumeric powder and cancer

Hello everyone

This programme was broadcast a couple of weeks ago.  No media organisation is perfect, but at least the BBC is not sponsored by commercial organisations.  Interesting to see that it re-emphasises the need for tumeric to be cooked/absorbed with fats to be effective.

http://www.ncl.ac.uk/press/news/2016/09/turmeric/


9 comments:

  1. I would use turmeric as a spice to cook with, but for more active cancer therapy I would use curcumin powder. Turmeric is only 2-6% curcumin. Curcumin powder on the other hand is typically about 70 - 75% curcumin, and about 25% or so other curcuminoids (demethoxycurcumin and bisdemethoxycurcumin). The point being that bulk turmeric powder has relatively little curcumin.

    Nearly all cancer research has been done with curcumin, rather than bulk turmeric, although I'm sure turmeric is good for health too.

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    1. Longvida is only about 25% curcumin, but packaged as a "solid lipid curcumin particle" for superior bioavailability. As opposed to unformulated curcumin, Longvida should be taken on a relatively empty stomach, which has been shown to improve bioavailability in animal studies.

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    2. Hi Stephen! Is there a particular brand of Curcumin powder you would recommend? Would you then choose powder over Longvida then due to % of curcurmin? Thanks.

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    3. My personal choice would be Longvida.

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    4. Hello to both of you!

      I've long wondered: Exactly how many of the Longvida capsules do you/CUSP-ND recommend? I recall that that CUSP-ND said 2 grams a day. But is that 2 grams of only the curcumin portion of the Longvida brand (which is an obscene amount of capsules!) or 2 grams of the mixture, which is still a lot but slightly more manageable?

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    5. In CUSP-ND the 2 grams per day refers to total Longvida (or 4 x 500 mg capsules).

      However as I mentioned in the comments to another post, the optimal dosing is unknown, but doubling the dose from 2000 to 4000 mg of Longvida (a 100% increase in dose) only increases plasma levels of free curcumin by 27%.

      http://btcocktails.blogspot.ca/2016/06/liposomal-curcumin-and-resveratrol.html#comment-form

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  2. Jeremy is taking 4 capsules of Longvida bid. Since no one knows the dose necessary to reach therapeutic efficacy, that 27% increase might be enough to make the difference. But this is another WAG (wild ass guess)

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  3. And to clarify, the 27% increase was in Cmax, or maximum plasma concentration. The "area under the curve" or AUC, was increased by 76% to 98% (depending on how it was calculated) in the 4000 mg versus 2000 mg group. The AUC figure factors in the time of exposure while Cmax is a single time point.

    Half-life of free curcumin was only 2.45 hours in the 2000 mg group but 7.5 hours with 3000 mg and 7.62 hours with 4000 mg, which means it took about 5 hours longer for half of the curcumin to be cleared from the blood in the higher dose groups.

    These statistics are based on only 3-4 patients in each dosing group.

    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20092313

    (Find full study in the Pharmacokinetics folder of the Library)

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    1. Excellent information from the group, as always...

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