Summary:
Indians are going to hate this piece of news. A new study says Turmeric might have zero medicinal properties in it. Shocking? Yes, because the good old Indian spice Turmeric is used like a medicine for various health benefits, and is now battling to retain the home remedy tag.
Indians readily apply Turmeric on fresh wounds, insect bites, chicken-pox scabs, and have it with warm milk at night to prevent cough. Medical professionals prescribe it for urological diseases, worm infections, and even cancer.
Such has been the hype around Turmeric that the yellow-golden spice is widely touted as a validation of traditional medicine.
Scientists have now had enough.
Turmeric’s gains have been ascribed to a chemical contained in it called curcumin. But, though there have been thousands of research papers and 120 clinical trials, curcumin hasn’t yet resulted in a drug.
In a new review of chemical evidence, scientists write that curcumin is an “unstable, reactive, non-bioavailable compound and, therefore, a highly improbable lead [for drug development].” The reason for this notorious review is because of its chemical properties that mess with leading methods to search for new drugs.
Most drugs are screened based on their ability to interact with certain proteins. It turns out curcumin’s chemical structure makes it produce “false hits”—that is, even though the compound doesn’t interact with the protein, the results of studies show that it does. Such false hits are then taken to clinical trials, where, after spending huge amounts of money, it eventually fails.
“Curcumin is a cautionary tale,” Michael Walters of the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis told Nature. Cautionary because curcumin falls in a category of compounds, appropriately named PAINS (for pan-assay interference compounds), known to produce such false results.
Inside the body, curcumin breaks down into chemicals which have different properties. Sometimes it is contaminated with other compounds that have their own biological activity, which gets falsely ascribed to curcumin. It even becomes fluorescent when ultraviolet light is shone on it, which fools a common scientific technique used to detect if a chemical is interacting with a specific protein.
“Much effort and funding has been wasted on curcumin research,” Gunda Georg, co-editor-in-chief of the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry, which published the review, told Nature. At least 15 studies on curcumin have been retracted from scientific literature, and dozens more have had corrections appended to them.
And, yet, most people working in the field aren’t aware of the mischievous properties that curcumin has. Georg still receives regular submissions on curcumin research.
The effects that turmeric may have on, say, a sore throat, could simply be placebo effects. That is to say, the act of going into self-care mode and drinking a hot, comforting drink is what results in healing rather than any direct effect of the turmeric.
Not everyone has given up hope. Julie Ryan of University of Rochester Medical Center failed to show in a clinical trial that curcumin could treat dermatitis. And, yet, she believes that the compound deserves more study.
Turmeric is made of hundreds of chemicals and Walters isn’t hopeful of getting real results. “It may very well be the case that curcumin or turmeric extracts do have beneficial effects, but getting to the bottom of that is complex and might be impossible,” he told Nature.
His point is valid. The resources being wasted on difficult curcumin research could instead be spent on thousands of other chemicals lying on shelves waiting to be tested.
Turmeric: The Great Indian Yellow Spice With Various Health Benefits
And for a long time, we have been reading/hearing this…
Ask any elderly person in an Indian family about the benefits of Turmeric, and they will list so many of them…not just cooking related but also health related. Be it a minor cut on your finger or treating cold and cough, turmeric is the perfect home remedy for such situations.
Here we list several other health benefits of this popular yellow.
Health Benefits of Turmeric
- Prevents Cancer
- Relieves Arthritis
- Controls Diabetes
- Reduces Cholesterol Level
- Immunity Booster
- Heals Wound
- Prevents Alzheimer’s Disease
- Improves Digestion
- Prevents Liver Disease
Fights Cancer
Scientists now have found one more reason to include turmeric in your diet. They claim that it can also fight oral cancer caused by a virus. The Indian-origin scientist, Alok Mishra of the Emory University, Atlanta, US, attributes the cancer fighting property of turmeric to its key ingredient called curcumin. It is an anti-oxidant that has a quelling effect on the activity of human papillomavirus (HPV). He explained that turmeric has established antiviral and anti-cancer properties, and according to his findings it is good for oral health too. (Read: Curcumin (Haldi) based drug used in test against Alzheimer’s)
HPV is a virus that promotes the development of cervical and oral cancer. There is no cure, but the new findings suggest that curcumin may offer a means of future control. Mishra’s research group first noted the effect of curcumin on HPV and cervical cancer cells in 2005. The antioxidant slowed the expression of HPV, suggesting that curcumin could control the extent of HPV infection. (Read: Can turmeric cure gastric inflammation and ulcers?)
‘Since HPV-related oral cancer cases are on the rise, we tested the same hypothesis on oral cancer,’ Mishra explained. ‘They turned out to be some very interesting findings.’ The new research indicates that curcumin turns down the expression of HPV in infected oral cancer cells by downregulating the levels of cellular transcription factors AP-1 and NF-kB.
The research was published in the journal ecancermedicalscience.
Previously, a study also revealed that curcumin shows promise in slowing the progression of mesothelioma, a cancer of the lung’s lining often linked to asbestos. According to the study by scientists from Case Western Reserve University and the Georg-Speyer-Haus in Frankfurt, Germany, the spice is a derivative of the spice turmeric and certain cancer-inhibiting peptides, increase levels of a protein inhibitor known to combat the progression of this cancer.
Source: The Health Site
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