What is curcumin? Should I consider taking it as a supplement?

What is curcumin? How is it related to turmeric? What should you know before you consider using it as a supplement? So curcumin is the active ingredient found from the turmeric root, and you will see turmeric used as a spice in a lot of Indian cooking. But other cultures use it as well. It's the yellow powder that's basically the turmeric root that ground up into the powder form.

But some people actually use that turmeric root too, and can use that in smoothies or cooking and things like that, where it can be used. The turmeric root when they purify the active ingredient from that, that's curcumin. So there's curcumin is considered to have anti-cancer anti-inflammatory properties and its effects on the gut microbiome through again, beneficial bacteria or diversity.

So again, it's all very early data. We don't have enough to say that this definitely helps. And if it helps, who does it help? It's nice to know that if you are this certain kind of subtype of myeloma or if you have these kind of features, it would help. But we don't really have that kind of data.

Curcumin is an expensive supplement again. So taking it and what dose to take is also another thing. It's important to know that often the studies have used very high doses of curcumin, which are not doses that we would use with cooking or physiologically in terms of cooking. So one of the studies from Australia looked at curcumin four grams per day and then they crossed over and did eight grams per day.

So that is a really high dose and it would require also taking like swallowing a lot of pills every day if you're trying to reach that dose. But what they showed is that in one they may have seen some very early signal in a small subset of patients that might have had in smoldering myeloma, have a little bit stabilization of their protein or decrease.

But again, because it's so little data and it's only clinical data, there's no mechanisms, it's hard to draw conclusions and say that this is something that's going to benefit the majority of patients. What we do know also with advances in curcumin preparations, that curcumin often is curcumin c3 complex is the one that they used in that study, and it's also the one that we are using in our study.

But it can be combined with black pepper for increase in absorption. So eating turmeric root with black pepper is supposed to have enhancing absorption of turmeric. So many of these supplements actually you will see they will say curcumin with bioperine And bioperine is the active ingredient from black pepper, where curcumin is the active ingredient from turmeric, and that enhances absorption very significantly.

And so with doing that combination, we could potentially be using lower doses, have less pills to swallow, but maybe getting the same effects. We in our study are looking at this combination of a curcumin C3 complex with bioperine in the nutrivention three study and also nutrivention two study. So we will again have a very comprehensive understanding on its effects on inflammation, microbiome and maybe disease as well.

And so as of now, I think things to also think about is the curcumin, the purified extract doesn't really have oxalates in it because and you have to see which company are buying, but most likely it won't have oxalate in it. But the turmeric root because it's a plant form, it has much more oxalate from the soil and all of that when you eat it.

So I think patients who have kidney stones or things, if they're eating that supplemented may not be an issue. But if they're eating large amounts of the turmeric root, that might be something they have to think about. So lots of things to consider. And I think the main thing would be is if a patient finds like I've seen some patients feel like it helps with their inflammation or pain and it really depends on if a patient's seeing some benefits and if they want to spend that money to do it at this time.

But otherwise, hopefully we should have more data in a few years.