All of us have probably used Turmeric, the spice that creates the yellow coloring in curry dishes or mustard. This spice has more to offer you; it is a hopeful budding weapon against a number of cancers, Alzheimer’s, cystic fibrosis, psoriasis and additional diseases.
No less than a dozen clinical trials on people like you and me are in progress here in the United States, Israel and England to examine the safety and amounts of turmeric’s key ingredient, curcumin. Turmeric is a very "spicy" and exciting topic in health journals today. In fact, it has been referred to 967 times since the year 2000 in items reported on PubMed, the National Library of Medicine’s service.
Turmeric is related to ginger and is harvested from stems of a big-leafed plant root, extensively grown in Asia. Interestingly enough, India has very low rates for prostate, colorectal, lung cancers, coronary heart disease and Alzheimer’s. It was the low incidence of heart disease and Alzheimer’s that sparked the interest of researchers in the Western hemisphere, and since then curcumin’s popularity is growing by leaps and bounds.
In contrast to newly formulated pharmaceuticals, "we know a lot about curcumin because it’s been used widely for many years," said Christopher Goss of the University of Washington Medical Center in Seattle. He is enlisting cystic fibrosis patients for a Phase I study of curcumin’s effectiveness and safety. The volunteers will ingest up to 3 grams a day, which is in excess of 50 times the amount used in a ration of curry.
Goss will also be in search of findings recounted last year in the journal Science that curcumin remedies the cystic fibrosis defect in mice. Cystic fibrosis is a defect that restrains a certain protein necessary to cell health, and results in substantial mucous that lethally clogs the lungs and pancreas. Researchers at Yale University and the University of Toronto discovered that curcumin therapy released the protein and allowed cells and membranes to operate normally, at least in mice.