Comment · Thu, February 27, 2020 · Natrium Health & Nootropics Depot
Is Curcumin even effective?
Original post in this thread
throwawayy913 · 45 points
I know curcumin is part of many regimens ... but there is little clinically reported efficacy ...
"To our knowledge, [curcumin] has never been shown to be conclusively effective in a randomized, placebo-controlled clinical trial for any indication. Curcumin is best typified, therefore, as a missile that continually blows up on the launch pad, never reaching the atmosphere or its intended target(s)…While these failures would normally end further research on its use as a therapeutic, they apparently have not deterred researchers interested in its development."
Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5346970/
I'd love to hear your understanding/research ... Is there any reason to believe curcumin is actually effective given this study and it's conclusions?
Edit: Thank you biophysiological brainiacs! - I felt like this statement was kind of bullshit, I found it here - https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/diagnosis-diet/201712/the-antioxidant-myth - and didn't agree with it after the first impression, but wanted to "poll the crowd" to see what your interpretations were.
What they were answering
PaintedSloth · 1 points
What's the difference between curcumin and turmeric?
u/MisterYouAreSoDumb · Natrium Health & Nootropics Depot
Turmeric is the root (rhizome) that contains curcuminoids. Curcumin is the most active of all the curcuminoids. Most places mislabel turmeric/curcumin products. You have to really look at the label. Turmeric usually has 1-3% curcumin, so many brands put a bunch of cheap turmeric and small amount of actual curcumin, but label it as "1,500mg turmeric/curcumin" to confuse people. Look at all the top selling turmeric/curcumin products on Amazon right now, and you will see they all do it. It's a massively deceptive practice. You want to take a GRAM of actual curcumin with piperine for the effects you are seeing in some of these studies. If you are taking 1,350mg of turmeric and 150mg curcumin, you are only getting around 190mg of actual curcumin. So you need to take over 5 doses of those products to get what you need, and then you are overdosing piperine. But hey, they can buy thousands of Amazon reviews, so people keep buying them. Doesn't matter that they are violating Amazon's TOS and FDA guidelines. We've notified them many times now. They don't do shit about it. This is why you get such polarizing responses to curcumin. Most people are not actually taking the proper dose of real curcumin. They are taking a shit product that is misleading them.
Along with curcumin, you also have desmethoxycurcumin and bisdesmethoxycurcumin, along with compounds like α-turmerone, β-turmerone, and (+)-ar-turmerone in turmeric. Those last three are mostly found in the essential oil. If you see some things as "curcumin 95%" that can mean a tumeric extract standardized to 95% curcuminoids, which only some might be actual curcumin, or a product that actually has a minimum of 95% of real curcumin. Both desmethoxycurcumin and bisdesmethoxycurcumin have similar effects to curcumin, but they are not as potent.