Recently there have been quite a few reports extolling the virtues of curcumin in the prevention or reduction of the spread of amyloid plaques, which are thought to contribute to the symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease. Curcumin is a component of turmeric, a spice used in curries. Researchers have found that populations that eat curries two or three times per week have a lower incidence of dementia.
Murali Doraiswamy, director of the Mental Fitness Laboratory at the Department of Psychiatry, Duke University Medical Center spoke at the Royal College of Psychiatrists’ Annual Meeting in Liverpool, England. In his address to the delegates he reported that “There is very solid evidence that curcumin binds to plaques, and basic research on animals engineered to produce human amyloid plaques has shown benefits.” He reported that “You can modify a mouse so that at about 12 months its brain is riddled with plaques. If you feed this rat a curcumin-rich diet it dissolves these plaques. The same diet prevented younger mice from forming new plaques. The next step is to test curcumin on human amyloid plaque formation using newer brain scans and there are plans for that.”
A study is currently underway at UCLA to test curcumin on human patients with Alzheimer’s. They are using regular curcumin and a synthetic version on the patients along with vitamin D3. (I have to interject here that since turmeric is a natural substance, it can’t be patented, so someone has to come up with a version that can be patented so big pharma can produce a pill that can make them some money)
As I mentioned in the beginning of the post, there are quite a few reports out there regarding turmeric. The following three articles were used as source material for this post:
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Apparently Curcumin is great to use on meat to get the germs out.
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