> The review goes into four examples for which details are available, all of them complete wipeouts, and those would seem to serve as good proxies for the rest given that no curcumin trial has ever reported any convincing positive results.
Note: this was a relatively small sample (40 total, split in half for placebo/not), who were elderly people who already have "mild" memory problems, and given a concentrated turmeric derivative rather than just sprinkling it over food.
In summary: very cool, and I'd offer these curcumin supplements to anyone 50+ but sprinkling turmeric on your breakfast cereal ain't going to do much for high schoolers.
Actually the age range was 51-84, so middle plus old age, not all "elderly". Normal people flourish and are in their prime around 50.
Volunteers had "objective cognitive performance scores and clinical histories consistent with normal aging or MCI (i.e., mild neurocognitive disorder) and inconsistent with dementia (i.e., major neurocognitive disorder)." [emphasis added]
"Normal people flourish and are in their prime around 50."
This is false. The only advantage people in their fifties have is experience. Your body is past its peak physically and mentally. People flourishing in their fifties are by and large reaping the benefits of things done in their younger decades, not because they are peaking.
I'm not saying that someone that is 50 years old is decrepit, but ask nearly any academic and they'll tell you they were better when they were younger. Ask nearly any athlete (ultramarathoners being an exception) and they'll tell you they were better when they were younger.
I didn't make that comment. However, I would say that people in their fifties have started to experience age-related decline in numerous areas (memory included). Showing a memory improvement in people 50-80 should be more accurately described as "restoring" their memory rather than "boosting" it, which implies that they now have supranormal memory.
Am in my late 50s, can confirm. Memory, concentration, attention, and a bunch of other faculties, both mental and physical, are trending disgustingly downward.
I know there are things I could do to fight it, but motivation is another one of those things going down. f--- it, f--- everything.
Pushing 46, can confirm. Literally just got that thing that screams "maybe you need bifocals not contacts" where nothing close quite comes into focus... basic response is "fuck it, fuck everything" like you say.
> Normal people flourish and are in their prime around 50
How do you mean? I don't think most people in their 50s would describe themselves as being "in their prime".
For example, ELO ratings of Chess players tend to decline in their 30s[1]. For NBA players, their "prime" is typically the late 20s, with performance declining in their 30s.
> I don't think most people in their 50s would describe themselves as being "in their prime".
I are not going to be part of a professional sports franchise. But at my age (59) I know more than I ever did, and I have no serious physical problems.
"no serious physical problems" is far from "in your prime"... and you might know more things, but your ability to learn has significantly declined. That's just the nature of aging.
The measure of flourishing is not how fast one can dig holes, nor is it how quickly one can study new APIs.
Knowing useful and effective ways to act, and acting accordingly; understanding and undertaking long-term, purposeful courses of action; and fully integrating new knowledge with vast, existing knowledge -- are key to flourishing. This doesn't end at or decline with the start of middle age.
If you think humans flourish only in terms of physical prowess or memory retrieval, you have very poor standards. To call someone who is middle-aged "elderly" does fit with your criteria, and with reports of ageism in tech companies.
I hope you're not involved in any way in hiring decisions, or in other activities that involve evaluating people's abilities, performance, achievements, or potential.
> If you think humans flourish only in terms of physical prowess or memory retrieval, you have very poor standards.
Nope, I just think you have poor reading comprehension - you are replying to a comment that said exactly the same thing. Flourishing (vibrant, active, enjoying life) != being in one's prime (peak performance).
Nothing wrong with that. My parents are 60+ and flourishing past their prime - their decades of experience are invaluable.
Note that I wrote around 50, not after 50. Middle age is usually defined as the 40 to 60 range (or more recently held to be slightly later, 45-65). That is the period when people flourish. That is certainly not when people are "elderly." Interestingly the Ancient Greeks used to report the time when one flourished rather than their date of birth.
Neither extreme athletic performance nor ELO rating are measures of normal flourishing (I'm surprised one would bring up such abnormal elements; the lives of NBA players and elite chess players deviate very far from that of a normal human). I wonder how the kind of argument you offer, and that of the sibling "olympus" comment, feeds into reported ageism in SV and related tech companies.
Are you equating "flourishing" with "being in your prime"? Because I don't consider those to be the same.
Being in your prime is about peak potential. And sure, the age at which you have peak potential varies by activity. My early 20s is when I have the _opportunity_ to be the best sprinter I'll ever be. That's my prime. But say I first take up sprinting in my late 30s, and put in my best sprint time at the age of 40. I might be "flourishing" at that point, but in no way does it mean I'm in my prime at age 40. The 20 year old version of myself, with the similar conditions and preparation, is simply physically capable of sprinting faster.
Certainly, there are activities where your peak potential is greatest in middle age. I'm not disputing that (however, I'm highly skeptical that memory and physical ability are in their prime past age 40).
> I'm surprised one would bring up such abnormal elements; the lives of NBA players and elite chess players deviate very far from that of a normal human
I mean, where can I get performance statistics for "normal people"? If we're talking about maximizing potential, why not look at the ones putting in the most effort toward that goal?
Also, the linked ELO ratings were for 179,221 "registered FIDE players". They weren't just the top-100 or even top-1000 players. Yes, this is biased toward people who play chess - but where else can you get the data?
I'm curious what you think a "normal human" is? Do you think any of those 179,221 chess players are "abnormal"?
To be in one's prime means to be productive, rational, social, and in good health. Not past one's prime, not "elderly" -- which is the particular term I was responding to.
I don't understand your (and others') focus on peak extreme-athletic performance, or peak chess-playing ranking. Why is it problematic to assert that people in their middle age are normally healthy, fully functional, flourishing human beings?
I wonder about the ELO thing how much is age and how much is priorities changing (kids, families, the realisation that outside the top15 there isn't much of a living in playing vs teaching/writing which takes you away from teaching etc).
Anand just won the rapid chess world championship at 48, Korchnoi was top-100 into his 70's.
Not saying there isn't some decline just that it may not be as pronounced as the raw ELO figures would indicate.
>Because curcumin's anti-inflammatory properties may protect the brain from neurodegeneration
My very first question was: Please provide a possible physiological pathway for this. I'm so glad it was answered in the very first sentence. So many of these "Superfood does X" studies are just trials with 10 people over a month, with no explanation as to __how__ it could possibly happen. It significantly increases the skepticism I have whenever something like this comes up
I also did not know Turmeric had anti-inflammatory properties. I guess I have reading to do.
Also interesting that they used (what seems to be) a name brand supplement instead of Turmeric
Given what we’re learning about the impact of gut microbiome on CNS, immune system, and other systems I wonder if the GI effect is it, but with secondary effects related to activity of bacterial colonies.
Gut biome is insanely important, I've had digestive issues for over a year and it's been depressing that they couldn't find the cause.
I finally gave up waiting and decided to experiment myself, started drinking a yakult every morning and last thing at night, within two weeks things started... Moving and now 6 weeks in its like it used to be, bloatings gone, regular as clockwork, energy levels are up and I generally feel better.
I still have other issues that are more serious but the medication handles those ok.
I started taking vitamin D a few weeks before that as well and that seemed to help as well.
For all the claims of bioavailability, I was surprised to see that Theracumin(R) doesn't seem to contain piperine[1] or any perines (which are usually in curry powder courtesy of black pepper). The 90mg dosage also seemed low, I have been taking 500mg of 95% extract daily for a couple of years.
I buy bulk 95% powder, pop a piperine tablet, and dump 3/4 tsp of powder in my mouth - eating something with it to get it down. I experimented with mixing it with various things, but it's hydrophobic and stains everything bright yellow, so the quicker the better. I was mostly interested in the anti-inflammatory properties, my family is full of arthritis, and between climbing and typing, I started noticing some in my hands once I hit 40. I do think it helps with that, and any improvements to memory or mood are a plus.
It's a small spoonful, I don't find it hard. You can certainly find things it will mix with (like yogurt, peanut butter, or honey) but it is really in another league when it comes to staining things, and I don't find that worth the trouble.
I have - filling by hand (set up opened capsule halves, pick up larger half, scoop and pack powder into it, close it with other half, repeat) for something you take daily gets really old really fast.
If you know a better way I'm all ears, as I'd love to keep filling my own piracetam capsules (commercial caps are 800mg, way too strong for me) but hate actually doing it.
When I took Piracetam I used a Cap M Quik machine[1] to make batches of 50 capsules at a time. Took about 15-20 minutes to make a batch and I was pretty leisurely about it.
Instead of taking tablets, try adding as an ingredient into your daily food. I think that will make it much easier to eat. Try cooking any Indian curries and turmeric is 90% of time default spice.
I wasn't achieving my weight goals like I hoped so I threw my arms up and said "FUCK IT chicken and sweet potatoes for lunch from now on."
I've been eating curry-powdered baked chicken for maybe 3 months straight for lunch nearly every day and somehow it's fine. Mostly I'm craving the massive amount of protein it gives me so maybe my body is overriding any "boredom" of the food?
Your body gets used to what you are eating and you actually start to crave that homemade stuff if you go on holidays. I've been eating chicken curry, rice and broccoli for the past 7 years. Only eat something else on cheat days twice a month and the occasional times I buy minced meat.
Not really that hard. Tastes great and honestly if you mind too much how the food taste your goals are somewhere else and/or have depleted your mouse buds. Even steel cut outs taste great with only little added salt.
Huh, well, I do! Sometimes I might add either Cock Sauce, or Green Sauce, or Orange Sauce. Sorry that's so unspecific, that's literally how they're labeled in my work fridge, in otherwise unbranded bottles >.<
Which is why you change up the blend. For example I recently got sick of toasted black mustard seeds, so I stopped putting them in my beans. I might leave out clove, or add some allspice, etc. etc.
You've really got to change it up to keep on top of your spice game.
There's way more than one type of curry and more than one way to enjoy a spice. For tumeric, fry some pulled aubergine with tumeric, garlic and tomato, for example.
95% what? curcumin or turmeric extract? I ask because I've ordered plant extracts on alibaba and did GC analysis. From the labeling it is pretty difficult to tell which you're getting.
One may be very high purity curcumin while the other is curcumin alongside all the other components extracted.
We eat a lot of turmeric. If you go to an Indian grocery store, of which there are plenty in the Seattle area, you can buy it in bulk very cheaply. We are vegetarians, so we put it in lots of veggie based dishes, especially stir fries. Frankly, I'm not much of a cook, and adding turmeric and pepper to my meals has led me to experiment with lots of spices, and generally improve the taste of the food I eat. Yes, there have been low points, but overall, it works for us.
We cook in a Kirkland Cookware set which I believe is stainless steel. It is still the same color it was when we bought it. Our blender, on the other hand, is now a depressing yellowish green. But it works the same regardless of its color.
My favorite "tea" to make is just chopping up a little ginger, a little turmeric, and some sort of citrus zest, steep in boiling water for 10 mins. You can re-steep it several times also. I drink it every day because it's delicious, as well as calming and anti-inflammatory.
It makes chicken or turkey delicious. Fry a sliced onion for a while in a pan with some hot chilli, then add chicken or turkey chops and finally a spoonful of curcumin plus a bit of salt; keep cooking & mixing until meat is cooked and curcumin is completely mixed with the rest.
In TS table 3 shows the Cmax was 25.5ng after 30mg of theracumin.
In PS table 2 shows the Cmax was 180ng after 2000mg of curcumin + 20mg of piperine (the table says 2g/kg but after reading the Materials and Methods section I believe this is just a typo. 2g/kg would be a ton of curcumin).
So comparing the two, it seems that Theracumin was absorbed 10x more per mg consumed. Of course, the question is if you consume equal amounts of Theracumin and Curcumin + Piperine, would the absorption rate hold, which we can't answer, but seems pretty promising.
More it more I'm learning that inflammation is a huge problem in modern health. I'd be very interested in a list of anti-inflammatory foods, supplements and behaviors.
Beware. We don't know that the inflammation is not compensatory. Since we know its purpose IS to be compensatory, it seems more reasonable to default to it being compensatory, than the original problem; or better, to withhold our judgement.
Inflammation is a symptom of most auto-immune diseases. Usually the inflammation is caused by your own auto-immune system attacking your healthy cells.
Some examples Uveitis (eye inflammation), Crohn's (bowels), Reumatoid Artritis (Joints). Usually these diseases come in pairs, so some people are just more susceptible to whatever causes these diseases. Right now there is no cure but in the last decades huge progress has been made in suppressing these diseases using biologics, but they have the side effect of suppressing your immune system which may be dangerous.
I am a neurologist. this is actually the exact opposite of what you should care about, which is "does it work to treat ___"
In this trial, and 99% of other trials, there is no mechanism provided by the study, only a measurement of causality (which is the same thing as effectiveness).
The authors may think they know based on other, prior, basic science research (as they are postulating here), but it does not affect the conclusions of the trial ( whether they do or don't (or even if they are wrong).
Obviously it's intellectually satisfying to understand WHY, but it's not as important as "is it true?"
The problem with “is this true?” Investigations is that there are tons of potential pitfalls and a combination of experimental limitations, poor academic incentives, and insufficient statistical and scientific training make this very hard to do well. I think it’s bad science, that will one day retrospectively be viewed as invalid scientific method.
I think the way to combat this is to avoid studies that solely attempt to demonstrate an effect, but to complement that part of an investigation with additional studies that demonstrate a plausible explanation. This reduces the risk of false positives and increases our confidence in the result.
The additional studies could take the form (for example) of deliberately intervening such that the effect should be manipulated by the intervention in a predictable and measurable way. Essentially, come at the hypothesis “from another angle”.
I somewhat agree, but "is it true?" is all that science can answer.
A mechanism is really just a narrower example without irrelevant distractions or confounding variables.
Kind of like the difference between the bug reports: "run this complex workload on this specific machine and it will orobably crash after a few hours" versus "run these three commands when the cache is cold and it crashes".
I find it odd that the sibling reply by fleitz (all that science can say is "is it false"), which just a precis of Popperian philosophy of science, has been marked dead. Not a view that I share, but seems uncontroversial.
I think it's clear that science gets us truth, but that the mechanism for that complex social activity can't be reduced to a few axioms or principles; Feyerabend gives a detailed description [1] of how bad a scientist Galileo was (as judged by modern theories of what science is), yet he was right, and he advanced truth.
Heliocentrism isn't truth, it's opinion [that's my opinion, lol!!]. Einstein's relativity makes heliocentrism false in demanding that there is no aether and so no special points in space.
Science provides our understanding of a best current description of reality - the whole point of scientific endeavour is to demonstrate we were wrong and that our understanding/description was flawed.
Moreover it relies on maths, which is provably unable to verify it's own consistency and completeness.
Furthermore it's an axiomatic system that produces a probabilistic framework that gives us little to hang our conception of reality on [what I'm saying is our perception is not particularly informed by physical reality, we have to subdue our instinctive perceptions to work with what amounts to our best, most consistent, physics view of reality].
Science gives us as much truth as we can see in a well lit test-tube.
Actually GR makes both geocentrism and heliocentrism "true". One is free to pick whatever coordinate system is most convenient to solve a given problem.
there are tons of potential pitfalls and a combination of
experimental limitations
you provided some, which are at least partially addressed by the study design. (I don't think it's your point, but let me agree that "the scientist can cheat" is always true).
poor academic incentives,
this is addressed because it is double-blind
insufficient statistical and scientific training
this is (partially) addressed by peer review, and the availability of the data. you can't make this general criticism of the paper at hand: find the place where the design or statistics used were in error.
I think it’s bad science, that will one day
retrospectively be viewed as invalid scientific method.
that's a claim without any evidence to back it p.
I think the way to combat this is to avoid studies
that solely attempt to demonstrate an effect, but to
complement that part of an investigation with additional
studies that demonstrate a plausible explanation. This
reduces the risk of false positives and increases our
confidence in the result.
If you have a double-blind, placebo-controlled, randomized clinical trial then what can the mechanism possibly add? Is an effective medication less effective because we don't understand how it works? If you want an amazing example, read about the mechanism of action of general anesthesia: we have many ideas about how it works, but nobody really knows. Nobody gets caught up by this when their appendix ruptures. I hope, for your sake, that you will lower your standards in the event that you need surgery.
The additional studies could take the form (for example)
of deliberately intervening such that the effect should
be manipulated by the intervention in a predictable and
measurable way. Essentially, come at the hypothesis “from
another angle”.
If you have a properly designed and executed randomized, double blind, placebo controlled trial, then you have measured the effect of the intervention, and only the intervention. You can repeat it in order to gain confidence, but you have to decide when the diminishing returns of "more confidence" are not worth your study dollar. And for curcurmin, which is cheap and has low side effects... it's probably not that far away.
>> I think it’s bad science, that will one day retrospectively be viewed as invalid scientific method.
> that's a claim without any evidence to back it [u]p.
You are correct. The irony is rich here.
I always welcome a good argument (whether in dispute or affirmation of an issue), but just saying "I think <XYZ>" doesn't make it so. Reading through this thread, all I see is the common HN Default Skepticism / Negativity -- but more so; skepticism with less scientific rigor than the work being criticized.
I am having trouble accepting your argument. Judea Pearl presents [0] the debate over whether smoking causes cancer as an illustration for why correlation is not sufficient. Two plausible, contradictory, models ('smoking causes cancer', 'no it doesn't, something else does') could not be settled by observing correlations. The debate was resolved through the addition of an explanatory mechanism, and a test of the mechanism's influence. Pearl, and others, have worked on the mathematical machinery necessary to examine this kind of causality.
Unfortunately, we don’t understand the exact mechanism for many (most?) available medication.
Correlation != causation. Which is why you need to do randomized testing and try and account for other causative factors. But if you give a bunch of people a medication and they stop dying, you can pretty much say this is valuable and start giving it to people.
none of this applies to a double-blind, placebo-controlled, randomized clinical trial (which is what this article is).
the reason it's the gold standard for medicine is because the only thing that is different in aggregate between the groups is the intervention. Therefore, it is the strongest possible evidence of causality we have, and does say something about causality (rather than correlation).
It's important to replicate, but the points made by Pearl are not relevant here and the mechanism is moot when you have a causal link shown by RCT.
To be honest, I think a randomised clinical trial is more of a starting point than an endpoint in terms of 'knowing' that an effect is genuine. The 'gold standard' moniker overdoes the authority of the RCT a
It can still be correlation. It's possible you're just attributing something to an attribute you're tracking but that's just coincidence. Without a sense of why, you can't be certain about any conclusions.
in this case they seemed to expect an effect on the amyloid plaques which cause Alzheimers and dementia (i.e. they bothered to do brain scans, not just cognitive tests)
Quite funny, had to reflect on my own bias a bit. I still think it's important to be critical of purely observational or anecdotal results when tested evidence driven medicine does exist. For example, suggesting a cancer patient abstain from radiation therapy, offering the alternative of cayenne pepper smoothies.
The study has all the statistical bells and whistles. And its result perfectly matches our understanding of cancer spread process - local overproduction of acid from glucose aerobic glycolysis (dominating way of glucose consumption by cancer cells) results in dissolution of the ECM (which is mostly collagen) - and the probable mechanism of action of the baking soda on it.
Obviously you don't understand HN.. everyone here is a "very smart software engineer" and knows far better than a simpleton like you with your decades of medical training and experience.
Ask your local doctor next time you visit to tell you what a P value means.
The medical literature is a tragicomedy of statistical incompetence and malpractice.
Specifically on this study it has a lot of red flags: not pre-registered so p hacking can be assumed, industry sponsored which studies show greatly skews results, small numbers, unrealistically high effect sizes.
The neurologist wants what's best for his patients today, which is to know whether a treatment is likely to work or not.
Others may value the mechanism more for very legitimate reasons. For instance, if you underatand the mechanism it leads to further research that could utilize a related mechanism or perhaps see potential side effects that would otherwise be hard to identify.
You really need both. "Is it true?" is a great starting place and oofers some treatments, but discovering the mechanism gives potentially a whole new class of treatments.
It's a matter of practicality too. A scientific experiment of any kind can only in full honestly provide a set of results given a set of conditions. No matter how well your theory may fit the existing data, fundamentally your data may simply be responding to some other mechanism you're not aware of or not measuring.
There is a huge amount of effort required to say why something works with certainty. Usually to get there requires many years of experience with a new surprising result. Which requires publishing lots of results before understanding the mechanism.
If you refuse to believe anything that isn't figured out from first principles is true... I mean... I have a condition and if someone told me a higher percentage of patients on a new drug did well than on the one I use, do I care if they can tell me exactly why? Not in the slightest. I will wait a year or two to see if side-effects crop up and ideally see the results confirmed, but I'm not going to not get a treatment likely to help just because they don't know how exactly how it works.
I think it's good practice to assume the results of a paper are accurate, even if you give no credence to the interpretation.
the problem is that efficacy studies (like I want) are not that exciting to report. as a result, the lay press reports only mechanism studies (because their readers like to be "wowed" and think about things, like the poster I originally replied to).
that wouldn't matter at all, but we all get sick. and when a person gets sick with this mentality that they need to understand the mechanism, then they start overthinking the treatments that are available today, drawing all kinds of spurious conclusions, and making medical decisions that are unjustified at best and harmful at worst. and in my experience, the smarter the patient is, the more willing (and insistent) they are to take this approach (witness Steve Jobs). This is absolutely not the patient being "dumb" or stubborn: it's completely understandable given how they understand science. But it hurts them, which no physician likes to see.
let's note how incredible it is that we are having this conversation in the setting of some incredibly expert scientists (albeit in other fields). it really shows how hard science can be to understand sometimes.
Appeals to authority, such as those you've made, are worthless.
The motto of the Royal Academy of Sciences is quite literally "take no one's word for it".
If you wish to blindly swallow assertions made by people with academic titles, perhaps you should start to listen to those who advise against it.
An appeal to authority is perfectly reasonable if the person in question is actually an authority in the topic discussed. The logic fallacy you probably meant is about appeals to authority in cases where the authority is in another domain.
Yeah, if I'm going to be wrong I'd rather be wrong alongside a bunch of people who are way more qualified than me to guess. What's the P-value on trust in expert advice improving outcomes? For every case where the "x was wrong" there are 1000 non-controversial cases where x was right.
> No. An appeal to authority is always fallacious.
Says who? ;)
> Your heuristic may be useful, but it is just that - a heuristic, not an argument.
Indeed, but in many but the most trivial cases (stuff like newtonian physics, or computer science, where most arguments are easily falsifiable) heuristics is all we have. Just look at the set of comments we are currently part of, e.g. many of the p-value posts, or the criticism of the small sample size. Those are valid arguments, but also wrong. But how can someone not trained in empirical science find out? Relying on an authority (relevant to the topic at hand) is a valid way to be wrong less often.
To put it pointedly: How do you know its always fallacious? Have you actually proved it yourself, or is this from a textbook/the internet, e.g. - from an authority? ;)
As far as neurology and psychiatry go, if we're not asking "how?", it's because we're very far from comprehending. Our brains are exceedingly complicated. If two neurons can ride a bicycle, imagine the complexity arising in a system with billions and billions.
More generally, however, a plausible mechanism is a great aid in determining the potential value of further researching a correlation because as we all know, correlation != causation, but correlation + mechanism pretty much is causation, which means correlation + plausible mechanism is very interesting. It's not wrong to ask "how?" here, though it might not yield much given the nature of the field. Certainly, anti-inflammatory properties can plausibly have positive effects on the psyche, so that's a mechanism worth some looking into.
I vaguely remember reading that the physiology of acetaminophen is still not completely understood. I doubt we will be lucky to figure this one out quickly. I also remember reading that the level of dementia in India is much lower than western nations and turmeric was thought to be part of the reason for that.
Turmeric has helped me quite a bit with my inflamed joints after learning about it at a yoga ashram. Now I cook a lot with it. What i have noticed though is that supplements do nothing for me. I only feel a difference when it's fresh powder or even better ground from a root.
I have done several experiments where I stopped taking it. Every time my joints got worse and then better after resuming cooking with Turmeric.
As I wrote before I have tried a few times back and forth with consistent results. Maybe it's placebo but it works reliably for me. As long as it works I am happy.
The thing with placebo is that it is an effect. As you say, if it actually helps (and does no harm, or replaces something that helps much more...) - then placebo can be useful and beneficial. It can be difficult to prescribe however...
The thing about placebo is that you can't measure it on yourself - you can only find out with large enough double blind tests. But as long as it works for you - placebo or not - good for you!
Actually I checked my levels a few years ago and they in the lower range of normal. The doctor said it's fine but I was wondering about that. My recovery time from injuries and workout also has increased a lot. It's probably part of aging but testosterone could play a role too.
You need to do a full blood analysis. I'm not a doctor, but I know that testosterone can be bound to SHGB hormones and then it's useless for the body. But your total amount of testosterone can still be high, in range and so on but if a large % of that is bound to SHGB it's no different from having an under range level. You'll still feel miserable, having a more negative view of everything and increased risk of cardiac problems.
So check your amount of free testosterone and % bound to SHGB. Also, levels mean nothing if the balance between testosterone and estradiol("e2") is bad.
To add to your experience, i have managed to treat several severe tooth/gum abscesses with fresh sliced tumeric root steeped for 4-12 weeks in brazilian sugarcane rum (51 pinga). It kills the pain almost instantly and after a few days of use, the infection disappears. I now swish it in my mouth once a month or so as a preventative measure.
It's important to note that there are more than 10 varieties of tumeric, and have markedly different morphologies.
Also: growing conditions or perhaps some other factor affects the depth of the yellow color of a crop, as well as smell, which seem to be indicators of potency.
Lately, particularly since the recent judicial decision in India regarding the intellectual property rights of tumeric which denied a patent to a western company, I've seen general attitudes toward 'curcumin' in western academia revert their opinion about it's potential.
i dont expect any study that isolates the curcumin molecule (which ks widely known to be non-bioavailable on its own) to be very effective.
furthermore (conspriacy theory warning) considering the lack of scruples of the bio-based businesses (med agri gen chem), i wouldn't be surprised to see medically inert or even toxic varieties of 'unprofitable' and/or 'competitor' plants to flood the market in places where tumeric isn't grown amongst traditional small farmers. just a thought, and fits the monsanto narrative in the us and india.
I post this whenever HN brings up a comment about supplements -- but I created a site to help track people trying out a lot of supplements and how it impacted health and sleep.
HN and QuantifiedSelfers find this as a niche site to record correlations and habits for self improvement.
I agree. "How" is a difficult question to answer, and involves basic research. "X does Y" studies need a hypothesis, a bunch of test subjects, and some statistical wrangling. Far easier than basic research. I'm now at a point to take all statistical studies with a pinch of salt. Molecular studies are more interesting and while micro and may miss the macro picture, are more promising.
Yes. However for me, when not using the turmeric milk thing, it lasts upto a week. There was a clear reduction in the time it took for the infection to subside. Now I am not saying this is proof that it's a magic medicine. Just an observation.
Not to say it's not useful (a plausible method of action + weak evidence is more suggestive that further study is needed than weak evidence alone, and that understanding could lead to further developments), but the question of does this work is far more important, and can be answered without knowing the how.
For bad throat, I usually had it in night, raw (if you can) (1/3 tbsp) and in the morning you will see the difference. Most of the time, my bad throat gets much better in morning, which usually opposite if i didn't take it.
Yes, it can stain skin as well. Actually, you can apply it to the skin (via a recipe) to make it vibrant. This is common practice in India. I usually get turmeric powder (unadulterated) instead of raw.
And if you like dried turmeric, try fresh turmeric. It's similar to ginger, where the fresh spice tastes noticeably different. But fresh turmeric stains even worse than dried turmeric.
Really? It's very mild in flavour. It takes a good dessert spoon to really taste it. It's mainly potent as a colourant. Don't spill any on your table cloth.
The wikipedia for curcumin suggests that it is not bioavailable. The results of this study are attributed to the supplement Theracurmin, which is a bioavailable form of curcumin. So maybe don't bother increasing your turmeric intake based on this study.
Lots of people won't realize that though, and by the time this research gets through the news cycle people will be buying turmeric in bulk. Good time to buy stocks in turmeric producers?
There isn't very much curcumin in turmeric. About 2% by weight. It would take 4.5grams of dried turmeric to get the same dose from the study. Admittedly it doesn't talk about bioavailability of turmeric powder.
Sorry to leave two comments in the same thread, but while I’m here... A tablespoon of turmeric weighs about 8 grams, so I don’t see why 4.5 would be an unrealistic amount to consume per day.
Coffee is only about 1.8% caffeine by weight, but it gets the job done.
Combining curcumin with piperine (from black pepper) increases curcumin’s bioavailability by 2000%, something many studies on curcumin fail to take into account. Cultures with a history of turmeric consumption often combine it with black pepper. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/9619120/
Glanced at the study. The supplement appeared to be 90mg of curcumin, taken twice daily.
A quick google search says there are about 15 mg per tablespoon. That would mean you'd need to eat about 6 tbsp of turmeric to get a comparable amount. Probably even more so, since I don't think turmeric is pure curcumin. For reference, the average curry or other dish using turmeric in my household takes about 1 tbsp, so at a glance I would consider it impractical to get that much naturally through your food.
My next curiosity would be whether a smaller amount can show similar benefit, or whether it needs to be at a level only available in a supplement.
"Turmeric contains approximately 2 percent curcumin by weight, so a tablespoon of turmeric, which weighs 6.8 grams, contains about 0.136 gram curcumin, or 136 milligrams."
So that means the study quantity was equivalent to about two teaspoons a day.
I think you got your units confused. A tablespoon of turmeric is more like 15 grams, 15000 mg. Turmeric is ~2% curcumin by weight, so you’d need 4500mg of turmeric to get 90mg of curcumin, or about a third of a tablespoon.
They used a patented extract of curcumin that's been processed for higher bioavailability so the numbers are not comparable.
There are a lot of patented extracts that have been proven to be absorbed way better than just eating a lot of turmeric which does not result in curcumin reaching the blood or crossing the blood/brain barrier. For example, the extract Longvida uses SLCP and has been proven to be bioavailable to the brain.
Wikipedia reports "Curcumin constitutes 3.14% (on average) of powdered turmeric"[1]. And the USDA nutrient database reports 1 tbsp ground turmeric weighs 9.4g [2]
I think that works out to 0.295g or 295mg per tbsp (on average).
Or just take one Curcumin tablet from Biotest that has 500mg curcumin and 5mg piperine. Easy and no harsh aftertaste that would come with teaspoons of it raw.
Turmeric is a base spice used in many dishes from South Asian Indian subcontinent. It is good news if this has positive benefits. Maybe country comparative research can provide more evidence.
It's an interesting result, but they do note that the subpopulation is somewhat self-selected: "Only approximately 15% of the screened volunteers were included in the study, and our recruitment method yielded a sample of motivated, educated, physically healthy subjects concerned about age-related memory problems. The sample, therefore, was not representative of the general population. "
Very interesting to see this posted. In Japan its ingredients are used in an anti-hangover drink, this youtube video https://youtu.be/Ij_aJI5O9Rs goes somewhat deeper into it, where the poster tried a combination of it and pepper to strengthen the effect.
There’s a difference between bioavailability and half life. Metabolic enzyme inhibition increases half life due to decreased hepatic metabolism of certain drugs. Bioavailability is how much of a drug your body absorbs from the initial dose.
There is a difference, but increasing either the bioavailability or half life of toxins is undesirable.
Also, CYP3A4 is one of the p450 enzymes. But after looking it up, piperine does seem to be specific to CYP3A4, which is better than inhibiting p450 in general.
And p450 exists in the brain, which may relate to the OP suggestion that turmeric boosts memory, but doesn't give me confidence that it boosts it in a way that is absent of tradeoffs.
Don't know about the study-- it seems interesting but like more research is needed-- but I do know that if you throw a little turmeric on your broccoli or cauliflower or whatever, before you roast, the veggies come out extra delicious. My kids will even eat them without complaining. ;-)
Yeah, it's just a good, mild spice that turns food a beautiful golden color from rice to lentils. Health benefits would be a cool bonus but the vegetables you put them on are more obviously healthy anyways.
Personal anecdote: was born and brought up in south India and my grandma used to make me drink turmeric + ground black pepper milk every night. It was a standard practice to serve it with black pepper, even though I’m sure they didn’t really know about bioavailability. Kids were forced to drink it when they have the flu.
Used to hate it as a kid, but of late I’ve been looking to replace one coffee/tea with turmeric milk.
About a half-teaspoon or so of turmeric, and about a teaspoon of black pepper. A teaspoon of black pepper might be a bit aggressive, so adjust it to suit your taste, but my mom seems to think lots of pepper is necessary to reduce coughing/phlegm when you're down with a cold.
If you're lactose intolerant, you can do this with yoghurt with a little water & salt instead.
Since this usually happens when I do have a cold, my laziness translates into a coffee cup of yoghurt + water + 1 minute in a microwave to zap all the bacteria out of it.
> was born and brought up in south India and my grandma used to make me drink turmeric + ground black pepper milk every night
I grew up in a part of South India with a fairly high natural background radiation (thorium, mostly) and I did wonder if the practice boosted survival via accidental cancer protection from an alpha decay environment.
Natural selection is weird because the goal of taking turmeric might have nothing to do with the survival advantages.
> inadvertently built using steel laced with radioactive elements.
> Statistical analysis on them showed lower affinity for cancer
Radiation Hormesis might be real (I hope so), but if it gets through drywall, it would be a different form of radioactivity to the one I grew up around.
Alpha decay needs just a simple sheet of paper (or dead skin cells) to stop the radiation, but it messes with DNA if you happen to eat it or breathe it.
That's the one from Th-232, in comparison bananas are also naturally radioactive, but the K-40 emits beta particles, which doesn't cause as much damage.
Alpha decay is what a cup of Polonium tea would have (from the infamous assassination).
What happens to the bioavailability of turmeric when you put it in your food for cooking purposes? I know turmeric is a common ingredient in Indian foods.
Turmeric has been used in India since ancient times. There are many references to it in Ayurveda - the Indian/Hindu medical sciences. Ayurveda believes in using food as medicine to non only prevent a large majority of human diseases, but also to cure several of them — all with almost zero side effects. Turmeric is just one such extremely powerful & healthy food item that Western science seems to be playing catch up on. Many others like black pepper, honey, asafoetida (hing), coconut oil, copper utensils, cloves, cardamom, mustard seeds, neem (gold), milk, clarified butter (ghee). So, expect more things to come out from the research of Western labs, knowledge that is common to most grandmothers in India for ages. But the other aspect is that we are slowly losing all that because Indians try to mimic the West in almost everything they do & nowadays do not trust our own sciences like Ayurveda etc, even at the risk of debilitating side effects.
Side fact: An American company tried to patent turmeric & almost got away with it. This had to be fought by the Indian government to prevent (or nullify) the patent application.
The problem is it's hard to make money off of those things. There's strong evidence suggesting papaya seeds are remarkably good for purging parasites from the digestive system -- but why research it further when you can push Albendazole for $400/treatment?
You see a lot of turmeric and a ton of other spices and herbs in SE Asian cooking too. But I really wouldn’t say that these populations are particularly healthier.
The idea that modern medicine is ‘playing catch-up’ is laughable. For every home remedy they get right, they probably get many others wrong.
That's not a useful avenue -- you have no control group. We can't compare people from India who eat a lot of curry to people from the US who don't: there are a million differences in diet, lifestyle, genetics, and environment that make it impossible to draw a conclusion about how it affects memory.
Your example is a good one actually: we know Japanese men are less prone to heart disease, but we don't conclusively know why. We can guess it's related to certain factors, e.g. fish consumption, but we can't know just by comparing the two cultures.
Japan has a very close relationship to Vedic sciences. This has been established since ancient times. Look at their gods for example, almost all are 1:1 Vedic/Hindu gods - Ganesh, Lakshmi, Saraswati, Kuber, Shiva, Yama etc.
> For every home remedy they get right, they probably get many others wrong.
Ayurveda & any Vedic sciences are arguably as rigorous as today's sciences, if not more. You're are grossly mistaken if you think Ayurveda is a "home remedy".
"rigorous" in science, especially biomedical sciences, has a specific definition. Where is the double-blind testing? Where is the statistical significance? Where are the clinical trials?
Ayurveda likely has a lot to offer as a FOUNDATION to start doing investigative research; but this claim of "any vedic sciences are arguably as rigorous as today's sciences" is bunkum. Show me any statistics / clinical trial data (or its equivalent) in the vedas?
I will accept & agree with the idea / contention that a lot of the treatments in ayurveda are possibly based on strong observations & correlations. Which is a good place to start modern scientific research from.
But to claim that ayurveda as written in, for instance, the Atharva Veda, is rigorous science demonstrates to me, a rather stark, depressing & baffling ignorance of modern science.
It is clear that you have not even read the Vedas to understand its implications on the world, especially in science. Most of the statistics that you ask have been lost due to them being so old, or deliberately destroyed. But we have the results to prove that these existed. "Strong observations & correlations" are just another way of saying "trial & errors".
Not just ayurveda, but take any science or even Mathematics. The Vedic civilization has been too far ahead of its European counterparts. In fact the idea of heliocentrism, gravity, action=reaction, universe & its age, speed of light, distance of the sun & moon from earth, understanding of time travel, time zones, metallurgy, the so called pythagoras theorem, sudoku & its various forms, the numeral system etc etc all have Indian/Vedic origins, so why would you doubt vedic medical sciences so much? There is also substantial evidence for surgery to have developed in Vedic India far earlier than Hippocrates or any Western counterpart. I firmly believe that if not for the muslim hordes who destroyed everything under the pretext of war, mankind would have been able to make better use of mankind's ancestral knowledge.
Look, you obviously have an axe to grind. And you are conflating too many different things.
So I'll limit myself to the original point.
Science, particularly modern science, even with all its baggage and flaws and politics, is evidence based.
Evidence in this case is statistics and data. Those are not present, from many reasons (as an aside, I don't think there is any evidence of statistical trials being performed in the Vedas).
There is no work in medicine in the Vedas that satisfies this criteria. Ergo, it is not yet evidence based science. It's observational. Now, if the govt. through AYUSH [AYUSH added in edit] actually invests in performing clinical trials etc. and publishing them in peer reviewed journals, then your argument may hold water. You are conflating correlations with causation / evidence.
> Science, particularly modern science, even with all its baggage and flaws and politics, is evidence based.
Can be reworded as: "Science, particularly Vedic science, even with all its baggage and flaws and politics, is evidence based." The vedas are not any different than any sciences that mankind honestly developed. Only, it goes far beyond what we (aka modern science) are/is able to comprehend, about the consciousness of the universe etc. With time, that will also be rediscovered. Also not to take away anything from modern science, many things have been discovered & invented far more than Vedic sciences. My problem is treating the Vedas as purely a religious book like the Bible & Quran and neglecting the great expanse of knowledge in it.
Now you are shifting the goalposts. This is what I am alluding to when I say, conflating multiple things.
Who, in this comment chain, is making any point about Vedas being purely religious? That is not apposite to this discussion.
The Vedas are a work of knowledge. In philosophy, in natural sciences. There is a strong argument to be made that they capture large parts of the essence of scientific temperament, which is analysis, refection & observation. But, modern scientific research is not just scientific temperament.
Practicing science, modern science, also requires evidence & follows a hypothesis-driven model that makes testable & provable / disprovable predictions.
You seem to be eager to misinterpret OR re-interpret terms to suit your perspective / point of view. "Evidence" based has a specific meaning. This [1] is a reasonable definition of what evidence based medicine means TODAY.
The vedas provide observations. They record correlations (perhaps). That's not evidence!
Lots of work has been lost; that's not unique to the Indian subcontinent. The library of Alexandria was lost. Many of Plato's works are lost. What does that have to do with modern science apart from regret & grief at what was lost?
I think you've misunderstood evidence based medicine as end-all, be-all of scientific analysis & only restricted to modern science. It is quite natural & largely common sense. Agreed, it is the gold standard for today, but it may not be so in the future, something else will come & upend that too as it always happens with scientific development. Remember Radium painting, that was also part of evidence-based medicine. By that account the Ayurvedic science has had fewer mishaps than science as practiced in modern times. Science is always about trial & error, my point is that it was not different from the times of ayurveda. This is as opposed to the biblical or quranic words of god, not the same thing at all.
Also, it is fair to say that Indian ancient texts have suffered significantly more destruction than others due to religious persecution and genocides against a peaceful civilization. The genocides are especially important because most information was transferred through word of mouth.
But how do you actually know if these Ayurvedic practices work without the rigorous trial and error that "Western" science demands? Unless I'm mistaken, the Ayurvedic texts do not contain repeatable evidence of the efficacy of the treatments described within them, nor do they describe plausible explanations of how those treatments work.
Whatever truths are contained in Ayurvedic texts are accidental unless they were arrived at by some sort of experimentation, and they're mixed in with a lot of nonsense which "Western" science is attempting to sift through. Along with proving the potency of some Ayurvedic treatments, science is also DISproving that of many others, which means that it's not "catching up" with Ayurvedic so much as catching it, shining a bright light on it, and asking it much tougher questions than anybody thought to ask before.
The OP comment strikes me as having a rather jingoistic/nationalistic tone, so I sort of doubt its sincerity regarding question of efficacy of Ayurvedic practices.
Any culture that has been developing food habits via trial and error for centuries has some that are beneficial, some that are harmful, and others that are neither harmful nor beneficial.
> Any culture that has been developing food habits via trial and error for centuries has some that are beneficial, some that are harmful, and others that are neither harmful nor beneficial.
How is that different from science? That is great & is science. Maybe you do not recall the recent news about how Radium painting was also science. All this is science, especially the Ayurvedic sciences. What else is it?
It is different in important ways from the modern scientific method [1].
In particular, it omits (or has long since stopped):
- Developing testable (falsifiable) predictions
- Gathering data to test the predictions
- Refining, Altering, Expanding, or Rejecting Hypotheses
Modern science is actively doing all those things: constantly re-evaluating its own prior conclusions and testing against the most recent empirical data available.
Ayurveda, like many other traditional health practices, is an interesting source of hypotheses that can be tested by the modern scientific method - and we might learn a lot from doing just that - but it's by no means a fully verified system of knowledge.
Other than the part that it has long since stopped or highly slowed down due to various reasons, why would the others be any different in Ayurveda. It is just medical science called by a different name. Now mankind's prejudice has made many shun it & discredit it again & again while at the same time digesting it & copying it to use a different name in order to credit someone else. There are many evidences for such copying, because not only are the good parts copied, but also the mistakes in the ancient Vedic sciences are copied by the people who want to discredit it because they attribute this cultural development to Hindu pagan religion — this while historically true has worked to encourage mankind to shun it even now. The copying of the mistakes are what gives away this dishonesty.
> Ayurveda, like many other traditional health practices, is an interesting source of hypotheses that can be tested by the modern scientific method - and we might learn a lot from doing just that - but it's by no means a fully verified system of knowledge.
That is true for everything, that is how science works today at least. Even scientific theories are tested again & again, just to prove them wrong. If they are proved wrong, then that is a great accomplishment, but how can they be proven wrong if they are not tested? Same with Ayurveda, it is just science with a different name.
I think you are quite mistaken. The ayurvedic or any of the sciences of ancient Indians use the same trail & error methodologies of modern science. Why should it be any different? A lot of the texts have already been lost, thanks to time, the British & Muslim rule in India.
I don't agree there are accidental truths. In India we have been following these for thousands of years. They were not exposed to the Western world, maybe because of the prejudice of religion, obscurity etc & also the belief that something of virtue is rarely possible in an Eastern civilization like India.
What ones have been disproven? If any, Western sciences have been building up on some of what were already discovered & documented. Also, I did not mean to insult anyone by saying that they are trying to "catch up". I feel at least some of what we are discovering nowadays are repeat discoveries of the Eastern / Indian / Vedic world, not because the Vedic people were smarter, but only because they have had a much much longer civilizational presence than any other. Even this longevity of Vedic civilization has not yet been "discovered" fully by the Western world.
> The ayurvedic or any of the sciences of ancient Indians use the same trail & error methodologies of modern science.
Then please show us the studies, and the reproductions. As you said, "Why should it be any different?", and verification via repeatably reproducing results is how science works.
> the British & Muslim rule in India.
That's a bit of off-topic attack that serves no purpose to your argument. If you were trying to make the argument the texts would have been preserved if India had been entirely under Hindu rule, well, that's an entirely different argument that does not validate an "Ayurveda works" claim. In short: "The dog ate my thesis" does not work.
> In India we have been following these for thousands of years.
As have been a lot of rituals and traditions that have been proven to hold no (or worse, negative) benefit. Age serves as a poor proxy for legitimacy.
>There are many references to it in Ayurveda - the Indian/Hindu medical sciences. Ayurveda believes in using food as medicine to non only prevent a large majority of human diseases, but also to cure several of them — all with almost zero side effects.
Homeopathy also has zero side effects (apart from having zero effects). There is no medical wisdom in any of the old texts (from any culture) that are relevant in 2018. The vast majority is pseudo-scientific nonsense that should be rejected.
>Turmeric is just one such extremely powerful & healthy food item that Western science seems to be playing catch up on. Many others like black pepper, honey, asafoetida (hing), coconut oil, copper utensils, cloves, cardamom, mustard seeds, neem (gold), milk, clarified butter (ghee).
All of those are known to the entire world, both their exaggerated benefits and their limitations. Sorry to burst your bubble.
>But the other aspect is that we are slowly losing all that because Indians try to mimic the West in almost everything they do &
You are severely confused. Do you take coconut oil when you get cancer? Or do you take Turmeric? If you get liver disease do you use copper vessels? Nobody cares where the idea originated. When it comes to their health, people will go where there are results.
> nowadays do not trust our own sciences like Ayurveda etc, even at the risk of debilitating side effects.
That doesn't explain the success of pseudo-scientific products marketed under the "Patanjali" brand.
Also, there is no such thing as "Western science". Its a global science and people from around the world are contributing to it. Go into any research lab in the "west". You'll find a large portion of people there belonging to chinese and south asian heritage apart from the local ethnic majority.
You're making some very, very broad, blanket statements about vast swaths of human experience and recorded wisdom (hint: that usually doesn't work out so well - nuance is our friend!).
But, to play along, in attempt to affirm or deny this - let's start with what you mean by "those texts". Which texts, specifically, are you referring to, when you say that they contain absolutely zero applicable content to the care of modern humans? (Where I'm paraphrasing your statement: "There is no medical wisdom in any of the old texts (from any culture) that are relevant in 2018").
edit:
you know what? I'll help you out with a single counterexample to your statement, so that we can move on:
To summarize, the plant Artemesia Annua was recorded approximately 2500 years ago in traditional Chinese medical herbal texts as being an effective treatment for the disease known as malaria. The 2015 Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology was awarded to the chemist who used this specific information from these texts to aid in the discovery of a compound that is now the defacto treatment for this disease.
There's plenty more examples like this; I will end my confrontation of your current system of beliefs here. The rest of this form of work is completely up to you!
>You're making some very, very broad, blanket statements about vast swaths of human experience and recorded wisdom (hint: that usually doesn't work out so well - nuance is our friend!).
I don't know about you, but when I read about applying dung into my wounds, I kinda lose interest in the remaining 4000 pages, and also happily forgo the 'ward off evil spirits' bonus that it brings.
>Which texts, specifically, are you referring to, when you say that they contain absolutely zero applicable content to the care of modern humans? (Where I'm paraphrasing your statement: "There is no medical wisdom in any of the old texts (from any culture) that are relevant in 2018").
Your paraphrasing is out of context. I am speaking about medical knowledge. Our knowledge has improved, but our flaws still remain. In other non-medical contexts, a lot of things would still apply.
Back to your counter point.
>the plant Artemesia Annua was recorded approximately 2500 years ago in traditional Chinese medical herbal texts as being an effective treatment for the disease known as malaria. The 2015 Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology was awarded to the chemist who used this specific information from these texts to aid in the discovery of a compound that is now the defacto treatment for this disease.
While that maybe be what is being reported it is not even close to the truth. The texts don't say "here's how to treat malaria". They don't even know what malaria actually is or how it works or anything about it. Traditional medicine applied a 'throw shit to the wall' approach (common in ancient times) to treat fevers using hundreds of different herbs. None of these actually worked, because there was no knowledge of what was causing those fevers (parasite/virus/disease etc). This is also why we don't treat malaria by giving someone a cup of herbal tea - it doesn't work.
What was a world record for a marathon a hundred years ago is barely the qualifying time for the Boston marathon in 2018. So yeah, The Chinese, Egyptians, Indians, etc all had their own world records. Its time to let them go. I prefer to take my medical science from the time when we know the most about the human body, not when we knew the least. You can make your own choice.
Knowledge is everywhere, science doesn't tell you to be narrow minded. If you deny human kind's past experiences, you would just end up reinventing the wheel. It is always hard to find the reason behind anything as it requires us to find the pattern first. Call it symptoms in medical science. Human kind has been doing it since its inception. Ancient texts are just there to help you out. Remember that there were no technological advancements as of today, still our ancestors had found reasons and solutions (cures in medical science) to many problems. You do not need to really trust anything, but what I am saying is that you cannot also simply deny it.
>When it comes to their health, people will go where there are results.
Isn't that exactly what you are disputing?
I think we have to allow for the possibility that some of the correlations identified over thousands of years may actually be real.
I would never follow any of that advice, because I agree that the scientific process we have today is vastly superior and supercedes traditional medicine.
"Try things and see what works" wasn't invented yesterday though. That's why people were successfully using citrus fruits against scurvy long before double blind trials became a thing.
Yeah 'some' of those 'correlations' might also involve sourcing crocodile dung [1]. Or maybe you prefer cutting open a vein and draining some blood when you feel sick? [2]
The qualifying time for the Boston Marathon today, was a world record 100 years ago. So yeah, maybe these remedies were 'world records' in their time. But now, we have advanced, and they're sub-par and often times downright dangerous.
Ayurvedic medicine is far from infallible. Take this for instance, a selection from a reasonably popular Ayurvedic text (https://www.amazon.in/Bhojan-Chikitsa-1-Ganesh-Narayan-Chauh...) that is aimed at a general audience and purports to explain the health benefits of various common foods (my translation follows):
> कैंसर: कैंसर में पहले तीन दिन रोगी को उपवास कराएं, फिर अंगूर सेवन कराना आरम्भ करें। कभी-कभी एनिमा लगाएं। एक दिन में दो किलो से अधिक अंगूर न खिलाएं। कुछ दिन पश्चात छाछ पीने को दी जा सकती है। अन्य कोई चीज़ खाने को न दें। इससे लाभ धीरे-धीरे महीनों में होता है। इसकी पुल्टिस घावों पर लगा सकते हैं। इस रोग की चिकित्सा में कभी-कभी अंगूर का रस लेने से पेट-दर्द मलद्वार पर जलन होती है। इससे डरना नहीं चाहिए। दर्द कुछ दिनों में ठीक हो जाता है। दर्द होने पर सेक कर सकते हैं।
> Cancer: for cancer, have the patient fast for three days, then begin their intake of grapes. Perform enemas intermittently. Don't feed the patient more than two kilos of grapes in a day. After a few days, buttermilk may be given for drinking. Do not provide anything else to drink. In the next few months, an improvement will slowly be noted. A poultice may be applied to their wounds. In the course of the treatment of this disease, the intake of grape juice will occasionally cause stomachaches and a burning sensation on the anus. This is no cause for concern. The pain will subside in a few days. Compressions may be given to alleviate the pain.
You could argue that such obvious quackery has also been peddled by Western doctors who are trained in the scientific method. That is true, but at least these doctors' manuscripts wouldn't be accepted by any reputable journal. Admittedly I'm not sure how the Ayurvedic medical community organizes itself in India, but I'm willing to bet it doesn't place so much emphasis on the scientific method, and you also imply this in your comment.
A less extreme example of what's found in the book, a remedy for diabetes using bitter gourd juice:
> मधुमेह: रोगी को १५ ग्राम करेले का रस सौ ग्राम पानी में मिलाकर नित्य तीन बार करीब तीन महीने पिलाना चाहिए। खाने में भी करेले की सब्ज़ी लें।
> Diabetes: Have the patient drink 15 grams of bitter gourd juice in 100 grams of water 3 times daily continuously for three months. They should also eat cooked bitter gourd.
I think you'd agree that the remedy above isn't as good a treatment for diabetes as an insulin regimen--the one prescribed, by the way, by Western medicine.
In summary, there's no doubt that traditional systems of medicine like Ayurveda or Chinese traditional medicine have discovered legitimate remedies, but it seems like they generally prescribe a large number of false positive treatments. And if you also believe that the scientific method is the best epistemological apparatus that humans have found so far, then you should be skeptical of these remedies until they have been clinical...
I did not claim it to be infallible, nobody does. It is a science, on equal footing with any other science. It followed the same rigorous trial & error procedures that is required of all sciences. And science does gets things wrong. Ayurveda roughly translates to the knowledge / science of health. Just because it is from India & it follows Hindu traditions does not disqualify it from anything.
Ayurvedic theory (5 elements etc...) is usless compared to modern science, so much that I dare to say it is wrong...
Does it have predictive (and thus real explanatory) power?
Imagine a test (other similar tests can be imagined):
give some powder to a western chemist/biologist and an ayurvedic to examine its "elements". You are not allowed to feed it to any human or animal. Decide if it is poisonous! Who will be more successful?
Ayurveda knows nothing about modern chemisrty or biology (real elements, cells,...), its theory part is rubish (from the perspective of natural science not from social science perspective (history, philosophy...) of course).
You may trust its experimental results, but that is not science in itself just a tradition...
I'm going to chime in to the growing chorus of HNers trying to explain to you why you're wrong.
There's no such thing as "any other science." There is science as developed and practiced by qualified researchers all over the world - including India - and it's all one and the same science, which is a set of protocols for rigorously checking the relevance of what you're seeing, and the huge body of useful human knowledge that these methods have brought forth. And then there's everything else, which encompasses "folk wisdom," quackery and outright fraud. If Ayurveda and its kin provided comprehensive documentation of rigorously controlled, published and peer-reviewed studies, it would be science; as it doesn't, it isn't.
Agreed that there is no "any other science". But human (Western) prejudices have made Vedic sciences (as in science originating from India) the lesser science, which is what I am trying to clarify. The reasons for this prejudice are too many, but it has a religious angle, an angle that the Church has pushed for too long that people have forgotten any other angle. Also the angle of Islamic destruction, which has ensured that most texts & documentation are destroyed under the pretext of war & iconoclasm. Please see my other comments.
There are 3 kind of logic systems 4 corners(chatuskoti), 3 corners(trikoti), 2 corners( binary logic). Entire western civilization is build top of binary logic. Only one god, america has friends(5 eyes) and enemies but no nutral parties(there are occasional cat paws ).
From western binary logic they can't even explain zero(mathematically). One reason is science is not global thing it's creation of given culture(In current case western culture). Because western main philosophy is binary one and as per there binary logic they thing there are only one science. And since west control the world for half millennia and still control the world they teach us there are only one global/universal science. example if you change Euclid's main assumptions you get entirely different geometry. In some comments says that ayurved is joke or useless fact is I know(and probably OP know's) it can cure series illnesses like cansces/diabetic and etc.
Trying to understand ayurvedic methods using modern western apothecary teaching is absolutely useless.
> But human (Western) prejudices have made Vedic sciences (as in science originating from India) the lesser science, which is what I am trying to clarify.
What, exactly, are you talking about here? It'd be better if you could cite examples.
So let me get this straight, if I have a Muslim last name I can't claim any attachment or heritage to Ayurveda even if my family uses it and we've been in the subcontinent for 500 years?
Everyone without statistical training thinks sample sizes are too small, but rest assured these studies are usually planned very deliberately. Power calculations are usually done in advance to determine the necessary sample sizes needed to demonstrate the magnitudes of different hypothesized effects according to a desired confidence level.
So, just as a sanity check, would we expect to see 30% less depression in country sized populations where turmeric consumption is common - for example is India less depressed than, say, USA. And how on earth do we control for it?
2. Also it says that it may "ease" depression, not eliminate it. So you would still have the roughly the same numbers of depressed people, but they may rate their depression slightly lower.
3. The definition of depression might be slightly different in a different country, so even a basic sanity check is still going to need to look at individual subjects and evaluate depression levels before and after turmeric treatment.
Is the interesting thing that turmeric has anti-inflammatory properties or that reducing inflammation eases depression and boosts memory? There are many ways to reduce bodily inflammation...fasting and keto come to mind.
It’s great to see an 18 month double blind placebo controlled trial confirmed in western scientific terms what the great healers and masters have professed for years!
There are side effects to be aware of taking curcumin together with other medications:
"Medications for diabetes (Antidiabetes drugs)
Interaction Rating: Moderate Be cautious with this combination.
Talk with your health provider.
Turmeric might decrease blood sugar in people with type 2 diabetes. Diabetes medications are also used to lower blood sugar. Taking turmeric along with diabetes medications might cause your blood sugar to go too low. Monitor your blood sugar closely. The dose of your diabetes medication might need to be changed.
Some medications used for diabetes include glimepiride (Amaryl), glyburide (DiaBeta, Glynase PresTab, Micronase), insulin, pioglitazone (Actos), rosiglitazone (Avandia), chlorpropamide (Diabinese), glipizide (Glucotrol), tolbutamide (Orinase), and others."
Turmeric might slow blood clotting. Taking turmeric along with medications that also slow clotting might increase the chances of bruising and bleeding.
Medications changed by the liver (Cytochrome P450 3A4 (CYP3A4) substrates)
Interaction Rating: Moderate Be cautious with this combination.
Talk with your health provider.
Some medications are changed and broken down by the liver. Turmeric might decrease how quickly the liver breaks down some medications. Taking turmeric along with some medications that are broken down by the liver can increase the effects and side effects of some medications. Before taking turmeric talk to your healthcare provider if you take any medications that are changed by the liver.
Some medications that are changed by the liver include some calcium channel blockers (diltiazem, nicardipine, verapamil), chemotherapeutic agents (etoposide, paclitaxel, vinblastine, vincristine, vindesine), antifungals (ketoconazole, itraconazole), glucocorticoids, alfentanil (Alfenta), cisapride (Propulsid), fentanyl (Sublimaze), lidocaine (Xylocaine), losartan (Cozaar), fexofenadine (Allegra), midazolam (Versed), and others."
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[ 3533 ms ] story [ 1796 ms ] thread> The review goes into four examples for which details are available, all of them complete wipeouts, and those would seem to serve as good proxies for the rest given that no curcumin trial has ever reported any convincing positive results.
http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2017/01/12/cur...
In summary: very cool, and I'd offer these curcumin supplements to anyone 50+ but sprinkling turmeric on your breakfast cereal ain't going to do much for high schoolers.
Volunteers had "objective cognitive performance scores and clinical histories consistent with normal aging or MCI (i.e., mild neurocognitive disorder) and inconsistent with dementia (i.e., major neurocognitive disorder)." [emphasis added]
This is false. The only advantage people in their fifties have is experience. Your body is past its peak physically and mentally. People flourishing in their fifties are by and large reaping the benefits of things done in their younger decades, not because they are peaking.
I'm not saying that someone that is 50 years old is decrepit, but ask nearly any academic and they'll tell you they were better when they were younger. Ask nearly any athlete (ultramarathoners being an exception) and they'll tell you they were better when they were younger.
I know there are things I could do to fight it, but motivation is another one of those things going down. f--- it, f--- everything.
I don't think that's true at all outside of Mathematics.
>Ask nearly any athlete (ultramarathoners being an exception) and they'll tell you they were better when they were younger.
That's obvious.
Quite a few great math papers are written by people over 40, despite the flashy age restriction on the Fields Medal.
How do you mean? I don't think most people in their 50s would describe themselves as being "in their prime".
For example, ELO ratings of Chess players tend to decline in their 30s[1]. For NBA players, their "prime" is typically the late 20s, with performance declining in their 30s.
1. https://www.chess.com/blog/LionChessLtd/age-vs-elo---your-ba...
I are not going to be part of a professional sports franchise. But at my age (59) I know more than I ever did, and I have no serious physical problems.
Knowing useful and effective ways to act, and acting accordingly; understanding and undertaking long-term, purposeful courses of action; and fully integrating new knowledge with vast, existing knowledge -- are key to flourishing. This doesn't end at or decline with the start of middle age.
The context of this thread is fitness - 50 year olds are definitely less fit than their younger selves. It's part of the human condition.
I hope you're not involved in any way in hiring decisions, or in other activities that involve evaluating people's abilities, performance, achievements, or potential.
Nope, I just think you have poor reading comprehension - you are replying to a comment that said exactly the same thing. Flourishing (vibrant, active, enjoying life) != being in one's prime (peak performance).
Nothing wrong with that. My parents are 60+ and flourishing past their prime - their decades of experience are invaluable.
no, it hasn't.
Neither extreme athletic performance nor ELO rating are measures of normal flourishing (I'm surprised one would bring up such abnormal elements; the lives of NBA players and elite chess players deviate very far from that of a normal human). I wonder how the kind of argument you offer, and that of the sibling "olympus" comment, feeds into reported ageism in SV and related tech companies.
Being in your prime is about peak potential. And sure, the age at which you have peak potential varies by activity. My early 20s is when I have the _opportunity_ to be the best sprinter I'll ever be. That's my prime. But say I first take up sprinting in my late 30s, and put in my best sprint time at the age of 40. I might be "flourishing" at that point, but in no way does it mean I'm in my prime at age 40. The 20 year old version of myself, with the similar conditions and preparation, is simply physically capable of sprinting faster.
Certainly, there are activities where your peak potential is greatest in middle age. I'm not disputing that (however, I'm highly skeptical that memory and physical ability are in their prime past age 40).
> I'm surprised one would bring up such abnormal elements; the lives of NBA players and elite chess players deviate very far from that of a normal human
I mean, where can I get performance statistics for "normal people"? If we're talking about maximizing potential, why not look at the ones putting in the most effort toward that goal?
Also, the linked ELO ratings were for 179,221 "registered FIDE players". They weren't just the top-100 or even top-1000 players. Yes, this is biased toward people who play chess - but where else can you get the data?
I'm curious what you think a "normal human" is? Do you think any of those 179,221 chess players are "abnormal"?
I don't understand your (and others') focus on peak extreme-athletic performance, or peak chess-playing ranking. Why is it problematic to assert that people in their middle age are normally healthy, fully functional, flourishing human beings?
Anand just won the rapid chess world championship at 48, Korchnoi was top-100 into his 70's.
Not saying there isn't some decline just that it may not be as pronounced as the raw ELO figures would indicate.
I mean yeah you need one dog who speaks but apparently, when you read other comments, there are enough papers saying the opposite to this one.
My very first question was: Please provide a possible physiological pathway for this. I'm so glad it was answered in the very first sentence. So many of these "Superfood does X" studies are just trials with 10 people over a month, with no explanation as to __how__ it could possibly happen. It significantly increases the skepticism I have whenever something like this comes up
I also did not know Turmeric had anti-inflammatory properties. I guess I have reading to do.
Also interesting that they used (what seems to be) a name brand supplement instead of Turmeric
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000629520...
I finally gave up waiting and decided to experiment myself, started drinking a yakult every morning and last thing at night, within two weeks things started... Moving and now 6 weeks in its like it used to be, bloatings gone, regular as clockwork, energy levels are up and I generally feel better.
I still have other issues that are more serious but the medication handles those ok.
I started taking vitamin D a few weeks before that as well and that seemed to help as well.
1: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9619120
>meme
It doesn't get any less disgusting even after a couple years.
They also sometimes made me drink hydrogen peroxide mixed with water, but that's another story.
If you know a better way I'm all ears, as I'd love to keep filling my own piracetam capsules (commercial caps are 800mg, way too strong for me) but hate actually doing it.
[1]https://www.cap-m-quik.com/
I've been eating curry-powdered baked chicken for maybe 3 months straight for lunch nearly every day and somehow it's fine. Mostly I'm craving the massive amount of protein it gives me so maybe my body is overriding any "boredom" of the food?
Not really that hard. Tastes great and honestly if you mind too much how the food taste your goals are somewhere else and/or have depleted your mouse buds. Even steel cut outs taste great with only little added salt.
Are we on the same diet?
Don't get me wrong, it's just my opinion. I would get bored, I can't talk about other people.
You've really got to change it up to keep on top of your spice game.
One may be very high purity curcumin while the other is curcumin alongside all the other components extracted.
This, for instance:
https://purebulk.com/curcumin-turmeric-extract-powder/
seems like what you probably would find with a simple search, and there's not even a mention of the actual curcumin concentration.
We cook in a Kirkland Cookware set which I believe is stainless steel. It is still the same color it was when we bought it. Our blender, on the other hand, is now a depressing yellowish green. But it works the same regardless of its color.
Piperine study (PS): https://turmericaustralia.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/...
Theracumin study (TS): https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/bpb/36/11/36_b13-00150/...
In TS table 3 shows the Cmax was 25.5ng after 30mg of theracumin.
In PS table 2 shows the Cmax was 180ng after 2000mg of curcumin + 20mg of piperine (the table says 2g/kg but after reading the Materials and Methods section I believe this is just a typo. 2g/kg would be a ton of curcumin).
So comparing the two, it seems that Theracumin was absorbed 10x more per mg consumed. Of course, the question is if you consume equal amounts of Theracumin and Curcumin + Piperine, would the absorption rate hold, which we can't answer, but seems pretty promising.
Some examples Uveitis (eye inflammation), Crohn's (bowels), Reumatoid Artritis (Joints). Usually these diseases come in pairs, so some people are just more susceptible to whatever causes these diseases. Right now there is no cure but in the last decades huge progress has been made in suppressing these diseases using biologics, but they have the side effect of suppressing your immune system which may be dangerous.
In this trial, and 99% of other trials, there is no mechanism provided by the study, only a measurement of causality (which is the same thing as effectiveness).
The authors may think they know based on other, prior, basic science research (as they are postulating here), but it does not affect the conclusions of the trial ( whether they do or don't (or even if they are wrong).
Obviously it's intellectually satisfying to understand WHY, but it's not as important as "is it true?"
I think the way to combat this is to avoid studies that solely attempt to demonstrate an effect, but to complement that part of an investigation with additional studies that demonstrate a plausible explanation. This reduces the risk of false positives and increases our confidence in the result.
The additional studies could take the form (for example) of deliberately intervening such that the effect should be manipulated by the intervention in a predictable and measurable way. Essentially, come at the hypothesis “from another angle”.
A mechanism is really just a narrower example without irrelevant distractions or confounding variables.
Kind of like the difference between the bug reports: "run this complex workload on this specific machine and it will orobably crash after a few hours" versus "run these three commands when the cache is cold and it crashes".
What is your view on science, do you think it can create - and verify - a true result? Whither axiomatic underpinning in such a view?
I think it's clear that science gets us truth, but that the mechanism for that complex social activity can't be reduced to a few axioms or principles; Feyerabend gives a detailed description [1] of how bad a scientist Galileo was (as judged by modern theories of what science is), yet he was right, and he advanced truth.
[1] Paul Feyerabend, Against Method (1975)
Heliocentrism isn't truth, it's opinion [that's my opinion, lol!!]. Einstein's relativity makes heliocentrism false in demanding that there is no aether and so no special points in space.
Science provides our understanding of a best current description of reality - the whole point of scientific endeavour is to demonstrate we were wrong and that our understanding/description was flawed.
Moreover it relies on maths, which is provably unable to verify it's own consistency and completeness.
Furthermore it's an axiomatic system that produces a probabilistic framework that gives us little to hang our conception of reality on [what I'm saying is our perception is not particularly informed by physical reality, we have to subdue our instinctive perceptions to work with what amounts to our best, most consistent, physics view of reality].
Science gives us as much truth as we can see in a well lit test-tube.
edit: fixed formatting
> that's a claim without any evidence to back it [u]p.
You are correct. The irony is rich here.
I always welcome a good argument (whether in dispute or affirmation of an issue), but just saying "I think <XYZ>" doesn't make it so. Reading through this thread, all I see is the common HN Default Skepticism / Negativity -- but more so; skepticism with less scientific rigor than the work being criticized.
[0] http://singapore.cs.ucla.edu/LECTURE/lecture_sec3.htm
Correlation != causation. Which is why you need to do randomized testing and try and account for other causative factors. But if you give a bunch of people a medication and they stop dying, you can pretty much say this is valuable and start giving it to people.
the reason it's the gold standard for medicine is because the only thing that is different in aggregate between the groups is the intervention. Therefore, it is the strongest possible evidence of causality we have, and does say something about causality (rather than correlation).
It's important to replicate, but the points made by Pearl are not relevant here and the mechanism is moot when you have a causal link shown by RCT.
http://andrewgelman.com/2018/01/08/benefits-limitations-rand...
To be honest, I think a randomised clinical trial is more of a starting point than an endpoint in terms of 'knowing' that an effect is genuine. The 'gold standard' moniker overdoes the authority of the RCT a
significantly slowing cancer spread with for example 4 months survival result - less than 40% of controls and more than 80% of baking soda drinker mice https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2834485/figure/...
The study has all the statistical bells and whistles. And its result perfectly matches our understanding of cancer spread process - local overproduction of acid from glucose aerobic glycolysis (dominating way of glucose consumption by cancer cells) results in dissolution of the ECM (which is mostly collagen) - and the probable mechanism of action of the baking soda on it.
http://andrewgelman.com/2017/01/30/no-guru-no-method-no-teac...
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2008/04/08/science/08tier.html
http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/12/17/statistical-literacy-am...
Ask your local doctor next time you visit to tell you what a P value means.
The medical literature is a tragicomedy of statistical incompetence and malpractice.
Specifically on this study it has a lot of red flags: not pre-registered so p hacking can be assumed, industry sponsored which studies show greatly skews results, small numbers, unrealistically high effect sizes.
Others may value the mechanism more for very legitimate reasons. For instance, if you underatand the mechanism it leads to further research that could utilize a related mechanism or perhaps see potential side effects that would otherwise be hard to identify.
You really need both. "Is it true?" is a great starting place and oofers some treatments, but discovering the mechanism gives potentially a whole new class of treatments.
There is a huge amount of effort required to say why something works with certainty. Usually to get there requires many years of experience with a new surprising result. Which requires publishing lots of results before understanding the mechanism.
If you refuse to believe anything that isn't figured out from first principles is true... I mean... I have a condition and if someone told me a higher percentage of patients on a new drug did well than on the one I use, do I care if they can tell me exactly why? Not in the slightest. I will wait a year or two to see if side-effects crop up and ideally see the results confirmed, but I'm not going to not get a treatment likely to help just because they don't know how exactly how it works.
I think it's good practice to assume the results of a paper are accurate, even if you give no credence to the interpretation.
the problem is that efficacy studies (like I want) are not that exciting to report. as a result, the lay press reports only mechanism studies (because their readers like to be "wowed" and think about things, like the poster I originally replied to).
that wouldn't matter at all, but we all get sick. and when a person gets sick with this mentality that they need to understand the mechanism, then they start overthinking the treatments that are available today, drawing all kinds of spurious conclusions, and making medical decisions that are unjustified at best and harmful at worst. and in my experience, the smarter the patient is, the more willing (and insistent) they are to take this approach (witness Steve Jobs). This is absolutely not the patient being "dumb" or stubborn: it's completely understandable given how they understand science. But it hurts them, which no physician likes to see.
let's note how incredible it is that we are having this conversation in the setting of some incredibly expert scientists (albeit in other fields). it really shows how hard science can be to understand sometimes.
The motto of the Royal Academy of Sciences is quite literally "take no one's word for it". If you wish to blindly swallow assertions made by people with academic titles, perhaps you should start to listen to those who advise against it.
Says who? ;)
> Your heuristic may be useful, but it is just that - a heuristic, not an argument.
Indeed, but in many but the most trivial cases (stuff like newtonian physics, or computer science, where most arguments are easily falsifiable) heuristics is all we have. Just look at the set of comments we are currently part of, e.g. many of the p-value posts, or the criticism of the small sample size. Those are valid arguments, but also wrong. But how can someone not trained in empirical science find out? Relying on an authority (relevant to the topic at hand) is a valid way to be wrong less often.
To put it pointedly: How do you know its always fallacious? Have you actually proved it yourself, or is this from a textbook/the internet, e.g. - from an authority? ;)
More generally, however, a plausible mechanism is a great aid in determining the potential value of further researching a correlation because as we all know, correlation != causation, but correlation + mechanism pretty much is causation, which means correlation + plausible mechanism is very interesting. It's not wrong to ask "how?" here, though it might not yield much given the nature of the field. Certainly, anti-inflammatory properties can plausibly have positive effects on the psyche, so that's a mechanism worth some looking into.
For example, How meaningful is the 20.3 point difference in Buschke SRT test? Is it noticeable in daily life, or just something detected in testing.
I have done several experiments where I stopped taking it. Every time my joints got worse and then better after resuming cooking with Turmeric.
No idea how it works but it seems to work.
Also funny that some men on TRT take turmeric(with some black pepper) to lessen the amount of estrogen converted from testosterone.
So check your amount of free testosterone and % bound to SHGB. Also, levels mean nothing if the balance between testosterone and estradiol("e2") is bad.
Great... We can have either pain or hair loss... And don't even think about the prostate...
Intelligent design... Meh...
It's important to note that there are more than 10 varieties of tumeric, and have markedly different morphologies.
Also: growing conditions or perhaps some other factor affects the depth of the yellow color of a crop, as well as smell, which seem to be indicators of potency.
Lately, particularly since the recent judicial decision in India regarding the intellectual property rights of tumeric which denied a patent to a western company, I've seen general attitudes toward 'curcumin' in western academia revert their opinion about it's potential.
i dont expect any study that isolates the curcumin molecule (which ks widely known to be non-bioavailable on its own) to be very effective.
furthermore (conspriacy theory warning) considering the lack of scruples of the bio-based businesses (med agri gen chem), i wouldn't be surprised to see medically inert or even toxic varieties of 'unprofitable' and/or 'competitor' plants to flood the market in places where tumeric isn't grown amongst traditional small farmers. just a thought, and fits the monsanto narrative in the us and india.
HN and QuantifiedSelfers find this as a niche site to record correlations and habits for self improvement.
https://betterself.io/ (Open sourced)
Till date, it has not failed once to cure the inflammation/infection/pain. The infection is gone within a day or atmost a couple of days.
As they usually do on their own.
It could as well be a placebo effect.
Here is at least one study I found on it:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4374920/
So I wonder if helps because it alters the bacterial flora in the body.
Now, if it more selectively nuked some nastier things, I could buy that.
Only reason I've used the root is when I'm out of ginger. Not perfect substitute, but, meh, kind of okay.
Lots of people won't realize that though, and by the time this research gets through the news cycle people will be buying turmeric in bulk. Good time to buy stocks in turmeric producers?
Coffee is only about 1.8% caffeine by weight, but it gets the job done.
A quick google search says there are about 15 mg per tablespoon. That would mean you'd need to eat about 6 tbsp of turmeric to get a comparable amount. Probably even more so, since I don't think turmeric is pure curcumin. For reference, the average curry or other dish using turmeric in my household takes about 1 tbsp, so at a glance I would consider it impractical to get that much naturally through your food.
My next curiosity would be whether a smaller amount can show similar benefit, or whether it needs to be at a level only available in a supplement.
"Turmeric contains approximately 2 percent curcumin by weight, so a tablespoon of turmeric, which weighs 6.8 grams, contains about 0.136 gram curcumin, or 136 milligrams."
So that means the study quantity was equivalent to about two teaspoons a day.
There are a lot of patented extracts that have been proven to be absorbed way better than just eating a lot of turmeric which does not result in curcumin reaching the blood or crossing the blood/brain barrier. For example, the extract Longvida uses SLCP and has been proven to be bioavailable to the brain.
https://www.thieme-connect.com/products/ejournals/abstract/1...
There are other products like Curcuwin, Meriva.
I think that works out to 0.295g or 295mg per tbsp (on average).
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turmeric [2]: https://ndb.nal.usda.gov/ndb/foods/show/292
https://examine.com/supplements/curcumin/
It's an interesting result, but they do note that the subpopulation is somewhat self-selected: "Only approximately 15% of the screened volunteers were included in the study, and our recruitment method yielded a sample of motivated, educated, physically healthy subjects concerned about age-related memory problems. The sample, therefore, was not representative of the general population. "
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lr4MmmWQtZM
Also, black pepper inhibits CYP3A4, not 450.
Also, CYP3A4 is one of the p450 enzymes. But after looking it up, piperine does seem to be specific to CYP3A4, which is better than inhibiting p450 in general.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2574793/
And p450 exists in the brain, which may relate to the OP suggestion that turmeric boosts memory, but doesn't give me confidence that it boosts it in a way that is absent of tradeoffs.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3223320/
Used to hate it as a kid, but of late I’ve been looking to replace one coffee/tea with turmeric milk.
1 tsp of ground turmeric powder
A pinch or two ground black pepper
If you’re not used to turmeric, I’d suggest starting with half tsp as it’s got quite a strong flavour (especially when not cooked with other spices)
If you're lactose intolerant, you can do this with yoghurt with a little water & salt instead.
Since this usually happens when I do have a cold, my laziness translates into a coffee cup of yoghurt + water + 1 minute in a microwave to zap all the bacteria out of it.
I'll give it a try. If my mouth catches on fire, I know who to blame. :)
I grew up in a part of South India with a fairly high natural background radiation (thorium, mostly) and I did wonder if the practice boosted survival via accidental cancer protection from an alpha decay environment.
Natural selection is weird because the goal of taking turmeric might have nothing to do with the survival advantages.
I tried searching but I cant find a study where apartment builings in Japan were inadvertently built using steel laced with radioactive elements.
People (10000) were living in them for decades. Statistical analysis on them showed lower affinity for cancer related deaseses.
Radiation Hormesis might be real (I hope so), but if it gets through drywall, it would be a different form of radioactivity to the one I grew up around.
Alpha decay needs just a simple sheet of paper (or dead skin cells) to stop the radiation, but it messes with DNA if you happen to eat it or breathe it.
That's the one from Th-232, in comparison bananas are also naturally radioactive, but the K-40 emits beta particles, which doesn't cause as much damage.
Alpha decay is what a cup of Polonium tea would have (from the infamous assassination).
It wasn't Japan, but Taiwan.
Side fact: An American company tried to patent turmeric & almost got away with it. This had to be fought by the Indian government to prevent (or nullify) the patent application.
The idea that modern medicine is ‘playing catch-up’ is laughable. For every home remedy they get right, they probably get many others wrong.
I agree drug companies are still fairly evil.
How would you be able to tell?
Your example is a good one actually: we know Japanese men are less prone to heart disease, but we don't conclusively know why. We can guess it's related to certain factors, e.g. fish consumption, but we can't know just by comparing the two cultures.
Ayurveda & any Vedic sciences are arguably as rigorous as today's sciences, if not more. You're are grossly mistaken if you think Ayurveda is a "home remedy".
Ayurveda likely has a lot to offer as a FOUNDATION to start doing investigative research; but this claim of "any vedic sciences are arguably as rigorous as today's sciences" is bunkum. Show me any statistics / clinical trial data (or its equivalent) in the vedas?
I will accept & agree with the idea / contention that a lot of the treatments in ayurveda are possibly based on strong observations & correlations. Which is a good place to start modern scientific research from.
But to claim that ayurveda as written in, for instance, the Atharva Veda, is rigorous science demonstrates to me, a rather stark, depressing & baffling ignorance of modern science.
Not just ayurveda, but take any science or even Mathematics. The Vedic civilization has been too far ahead of its European counterparts. In fact the idea of heliocentrism, gravity, action=reaction, universe & its age, speed of light, distance of the sun & moon from earth, understanding of time travel, time zones, metallurgy, the so called pythagoras theorem, sudoku & its various forms, the numeral system etc etc all have Indian/Vedic origins, so why would you doubt vedic medical sciences so much? There is also substantial evidence for surgery to have developed in Vedic India far earlier than Hippocrates or any Western counterpart. I firmly believe that if not for the muslim hordes who destroyed everything under the pretext of war, mankind would have been able to make better use of mankind's ancestral knowledge.
So I'll limit myself to the original point.
Science, particularly modern science, even with all its baggage and flaws and politics, is evidence based.
Evidence in this case is statistics and data. Those are not present, from many reasons (as an aside, I don't think there is any evidence of statistical trials being performed in the Vedas).
There is no work in medicine in the Vedas that satisfies this criteria. Ergo, it is not yet evidence based science. It's observational. Now, if the govt. through AYUSH [AYUSH added in edit] actually invests in performing clinical trials etc. and publishing them in peer reviewed journals, then your argument may hold water. You are conflating correlations with causation / evidence.
> Science, particularly modern science, even with all its baggage and flaws and politics, is evidence based.
Can be reworded as: "Science, particularly Vedic science, even with all its baggage and flaws and politics, is evidence based." The vedas are not any different than any sciences that mankind honestly developed. Only, it goes far beyond what we (aka modern science) are/is able to comprehend, about the consciousness of the universe etc. With time, that will also be rediscovered. Also not to take away anything from modern science, many things have been discovered & invented far more than Vedic sciences. My problem is treating the Vedas as purely a religious book like the Bible & Quran and neglecting the great expanse of knowledge in it.
Who, in this comment chain, is making any point about Vedas being purely religious? That is not apposite to this discussion.
The Vedas are a work of knowledge. In philosophy, in natural sciences. There is a strong argument to be made that they capture large parts of the essence of scientific temperament, which is analysis, refection & observation. But, modern scientific research is not just scientific temperament.
Practicing science, modern science, also requires evidence & follows a hypothesis-driven model that makes testable & provable / disprovable predictions.
You seem to be eager to misinterpret OR re-interpret terms to suit your perspective / point of view. "Evidence" based has a specific meaning. This [1] is a reasonable definition of what evidence based medicine means TODAY.
The vedas provide observations. They record correlations (perhaps). That's not evidence!
Lots of work has been lost; that's not unique to the Indian subcontinent. The library of Alexandria was lost. Many of Plato's works are lost. What does that have to do with modern science apart from regret & grief at what was lost?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidence-based_medicine
Also, it is fair to say that Indian ancient texts have suffered significantly more destruction than others due to religious persecution and genocides against a peaceful civilization. The genocides are especially important because most information was transferred through word of mouth.
They may have been ahead of the Europeans in the past. But that’s irrelevant now. They are not ahead of modern civilisation.
And perhaps there’s some lost knowledge, but these alternative treatments as practiced now have never been shown to be effective.
Whatever truths are contained in Ayurvedic texts are accidental unless they were arrived at by some sort of experimentation, and they're mixed in with a lot of nonsense which "Western" science is attempting to sift through. Along with proving the potency of some Ayurvedic treatments, science is also DISproving that of many others, which means that it's not "catching up" with Ayurvedic so much as catching it, shining a bright light on it, and asking it much tougher questions than anybody thought to ask before.
Any culture that has been developing food habits via trial and error for centuries has some that are beneficial, some that are harmful, and others that are neither harmful nor beneficial.
How is that different from science? That is great & is science. Maybe you do not recall the recent news about how Radium painting was also science. All this is science, especially the Ayurvedic sciences. What else is it?
In particular, it omits (or has long since stopped):
- Developing testable (falsifiable) predictions
- Gathering data to test the predictions
- Refining, Altering, Expanding, or Rejecting Hypotheses
Modern science is actively doing all those things: constantly re-evaluating its own prior conclusions and testing against the most recent empirical data available.
Ayurveda, like many other traditional health practices, is an interesting source of hypotheses that can be tested by the modern scientific method - and we might learn a lot from doing just that - but it's by no means a fully verified system of knowledge.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method#/media/File:...
> Ayurveda, like many other traditional health practices, is an interesting source of hypotheses that can be tested by the modern scientific method - and we might learn a lot from doing just that - but it's by no means a fully verified system of knowledge.
That is true for everything, that is how science works today at least. Even scientific theories are tested again & again, just to prove them wrong. If they are proved wrong, then that is a great accomplishment, but how can they be proven wrong if they are not tested? Same with Ayurveda, it is just science with a different name.
I don't agree there are accidental truths. In India we have been following these for thousands of years. They were not exposed to the Western world, maybe because of the prejudice of religion, obscurity etc & also the belief that something of virtue is rarely possible in an Eastern civilization like India.
What ones have been disproven? If any, Western sciences have been building up on some of what were already discovered & documented. Also, I did not mean to insult anyone by saying that they are trying to "catch up". I feel at least some of what we are discovering nowadays are repeat discoveries of the Eastern / Indian / Vedic world, not because the Vedic people were smarter, but only because they have had a much much longer civilizational presence than any other. Even this longevity of Vedic civilization has not yet been "discovered" fully by the Western world.
Then please show us the studies, and the reproductions. As you said, "Why should it be any different?", and verification via repeatably reproducing results is how science works.
> the British & Muslim rule in India.
That's a bit of off-topic attack that serves no purpose to your argument. If you were trying to make the argument the texts would have been preserved if India had been entirely under Hindu rule, well, that's an entirely different argument that does not validate an "Ayurveda works" claim. In short: "The dog ate my thesis" does not work.
> In India we have been following these for thousands of years.
As have been a lot of rituals and traditions that have been proven to hold no (or worse, negative) benefit. Age serves as a poor proxy for legitimacy.
Homeopathy also has zero side effects (apart from having zero effects). There is no medical wisdom in any of the old texts (from any culture) that are relevant in 2018. The vast majority is pseudo-scientific nonsense that should be rejected.
>Turmeric is just one such extremely powerful & healthy food item that Western science seems to be playing catch up on. Many others like black pepper, honey, asafoetida (hing), coconut oil, copper utensils, cloves, cardamom, mustard seeds, neem (gold), milk, clarified butter (ghee).
All of those are known to the entire world, both their exaggerated benefits and their limitations. Sorry to burst your bubble.
>But the other aspect is that we are slowly losing all that because Indians try to mimic the West in almost everything they do &
You are severely confused. Do you take coconut oil when you get cancer? Or do you take Turmeric? If you get liver disease do you use copper vessels? Nobody cares where the idea originated. When it comes to their health, people will go where there are results.
> nowadays do not trust our own sciences like Ayurveda etc, even at the risk of debilitating side effects.
That doesn't explain the success of pseudo-scientific products marketed under the "Patanjali" brand.
Also, there is no such thing as "Western science". Its a global science and people from around the world are contributing to it. Go into any research lab in the "west". You'll find a large portion of people there belonging to chinese and south asian heritage apart from the local ethnic majority.
Seriously? We can do better than that - if you're going to make a statement that extreme, you'll need to provide sources to back it up.
But, to play along, in attempt to affirm or deny this - let's start with what you mean by "those texts". Which texts, specifically, are you referring to, when you say that they contain absolutely zero applicable content to the care of modern humans? (Where I'm paraphrasing your statement: "There is no medical wisdom in any of the old texts (from any culture) that are relevant in 2018").
edit:
you know what? I'll help you out with a single counterexample to your statement, so that we can move on:
http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-china-blog-34451386
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_Youyou#Malaria
To summarize, the plant Artemesia Annua was recorded approximately 2500 years ago in traditional Chinese medical herbal texts as being an effective treatment for the disease known as malaria. The 2015 Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology was awarded to the chemist who used this specific information from these texts to aid in the discovery of a compound that is now the defacto treatment for this disease.
There's plenty more examples like this; I will end my confrontation of your current system of beliefs here. The rest of this form of work is completely up to you!
I don't know about you, but when I read about applying dung into my wounds, I kinda lose interest in the remaining 4000 pages, and also happily forgo the 'ward off evil spirits' bonus that it brings.
>Which texts, specifically, are you referring to, when you say that they contain absolutely zero applicable content to the care of modern humans? (Where I'm paraphrasing your statement: "There is no medical wisdom in any of the old texts (from any culture) that are relevant in 2018").
Your paraphrasing is out of context. I am speaking about medical knowledge. Our knowledge has improved, but our flaws still remain. In other non-medical contexts, a lot of things would still apply.
Back to your counter point.
>the plant Artemesia Annua was recorded approximately 2500 years ago in traditional Chinese medical herbal texts as being an effective treatment for the disease known as malaria. The 2015 Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology was awarded to the chemist who used this specific information from these texts to aid in the discovery of a compound that is now the defacto treatment for this disease.
While that maybe be what is being reported it is not even close to the truth. The texts don't say "here's how to treat malaria". They don't even know what malaria actually is or how it works or anything about it. Traditional medicine applied a 'throw shit to the wall' approach (common in ancient times) to treat fevers using hundreds of different herbs. None of these actually worked, because there was no knowledge of what was causing those fevers (parasite/virus/disease etc). This is also why we don't treat malaria by giving someone a cup of herbal tea - it doesn't work.
What was a world record for a marathon a hundred years ago is barely the qualifying time for the Boston marathon in 2018. So yeah, The Chinese, Egyptians, Indians, etc all had their own world records. Its time to let them go. I prefer to take my medical science from the time when we know the most about the human body, not when we knew the least. You can make your own choice.
Isn't that exactly what you are disputing?
I think we have to allow for the possibility that some of the correlations identified over thousands of years may actually be real.
I would never follow any of that advice, because I agree that the scientific process we have today is vastly superior and supercedes traditional medicine.
"Try things and see what works" wasn't invented yesterday though. That's why people were successfully using citrus fruits against scurvy long before double blind trials became a thing.
The qualifying time for the Boston Marathon today, was a world record 100 years ago. So yeah, maybe these remedies were 'world records' in their time. But now, we have advanced, and they're sub-par and often times downright dangerous.
[1] http://www.crystalinks.com/egyptmedicine.html
[2] http://www.nytimes.com/1999/12/14/health/death-of-a-presiden...
> कैंसर: कैंसर में पहले तीन दिन रोगी को उपवास कराएं, फिर अंगूर सेवन कराना आरम्भ करें। कभी-कभी एनिमा लगाएं। एक दिन में दो किलो से अधिक अंगूर न खिलाएं। कुछ दिन पश्चात छाछ पीने को दी जा सकती है। अन्य कोई चीज़ खाने को न दें। इससे लाभ धीरे-धीरे महीनों में होता है। इसकी पुल्टिस घावों पर लगा सकते हैं। इस रोग की चिकित्सा में कभी-कभी अंगूर का रस लेने से पेट-दर्द मलद्वार पर जलन होती है। इससे डरना नहीं चाहिए। दर्द कुछ दिनों में ठीक हो जाता है। दर्द होने पर सेक कर सकते हैं।
> Cancer: for cancer, have the patient fast for three days, then begin their intake of grapes. Perform enemas intermittently. Don't feed the patient more than two kilos of grapes in a day. After a few days, buttermilk may be given for drinking. Do not provide anything else to drink. In the next few months, an improvement will slowly be noted. A poultice may be applied to their wounds. In the course of the treatment of this disease, the intake of grape juice will occasionally cause stomachaches and a burning sensation on the anus. This is no cause for concern. The pain will subside in a few days. Compressions may be given to alleviate the pain.
You could argue that such obvious quackery has also been peddled by Western doctors who are trained in the scientific method. That is true, but at least these doctors' manuscripts wouldn't be accepted by any reputable journal. Admittedly I'm not sure how the Ayurvedic medical community organizes itself in India, but I'm willing to bet it doesn't place so much emphasis on the scientific method, and you also imply this in your comment.
A less extreme example of what's found in the book, a remedy for diabetes using bitter gourd juice:
> मधुमेह: रोगी को १५ ग्राम करेले का रस सौ ग्राम पानी में मिलाकर नित्य तीन बार करीब तीन महीने पिलाना चाहिए। खाने में भी करेले की सब्ज़ी लें।
> Diabetes: Have the patient drink 15 grams of bitter gourd juice in 100 grams of water 3 times daily continuously for three months. They should also eat cooked bitter gourd.
I think you'd agree that the remedy above isn't as good a treatment for diabetes as an insulin regimen--the one prescribed, by the way, by Western medicine.
In summary, there's no doubt that traditional systems of medicine like Ayurveda or Chinese traditional medicine have discovered legitimate remedies, but it seems like they generally prescribe a large number of false positive treatments. And if you also believe that the scientific method is the best epistemological apparatus that humans have found so far, then you should be skeptical of these remedies until they have been clinical...
Does it have predictive (and thus real explanatory) power? Imagine a test (other similar tests can be imagined):
give some powder to a western chemist/biologist and an ayurvedic to examine its "elements". You are not allowed to feed it to any human or animal. Decide if it is poisonous! Who will be more successful?
Ayurveda knows nothing about modern chemisrty or biology (real elements, cells,...), its theory part is rubish (from the perspective of natural science not from social science perspective (history, philosophy...) of course).
You may trust its experimental results, but that is not science in itself just a tradition...
There's no such thing as "any other science." There is science as developed and practiced by qualified researchers all over the world - including India - and it's all one and the same science, which is a set of protocols for rigorously checking the relevance of what you're seeing, and the huge body of useful human knowledge that these methods have brought forth. And then there's everything else, which encompasses "folk wisdom," quackery and outright fraud. If Ayurveda and its kin provided comprehensive documentation of rigorously controlled, published and peer-reviewed studies, it would be science; as it doesn't, it isn't.
What, exactly, are you talking about here? It'd be better if you could cite examples.
Before you say a word about your cancer treating poop juice remind you taking chances with someone else's life.
http://clscholarship.org/
https://startalk.umd.edu/public/about
1. The 30% number was for memory, not depression.
2. Also it says that it may "ease" depression, not eliminate it. So you would still have the roughly the same numbers of depressed people, but they may rate their depression slightly lower.
3. The definition of depression might be slightly different in a different country, so even a basic sanity check is still going to need to look at individual subjects and evaluate depression levels before and after turmeric treatment.
"Medications for diabetes (Antidiabetes drugs) Interaction Rating: Moderate Be cautious with this combination. Talk with your health provider. Turmeric might decrease blood sugar in people with type 2 diabetes. Diabetes medications are also used to lower blood sugar. Taking turmeric along with diabetes medications might cause your blood sugar to go too low. Monitor your blood sugar closely. The dose of your diabetes medication might need to be changed.
Some medications used for diabetes include glimepiride (Amaryl), glyburide (DiaBeta, Glynase PresTab, Micronase), insulin, pioglitazone (Actos), rosiglitazone (Avandia), chlorpropamide (Diabinese), glipizide (Glucotrol), tolbutamide (Orinase), and others."
Turmeric might slow blood clotting. Taking turmeric along with medications that also slow clotting might increase the chances of bruising and bleeding.
Medications changed by the liver (Cytochrome P450 3A4 (CYP3A4) substrates) Interaction Rating: Moderate Be cautious with this combination. Talk with your health provider. Some medications are changed and broken down by the liver. Turmeric might decrease how quickly the liver breaks down some medications. Taking turmeric along with some medications that are broken down by the liver can increase the effects and side effects of some medications. Before taking turmeric talk to your healthcare provider if you take any medications that are changed by the liver.
Some medications that are changed by the liver include some calcium channel blockers (diltiazem, nicardipine, verapamil), chemotherapeutic agents (etoposide, paclitaxel, vinblastine, vincristine, vindesine), antifungals (ketoconazole, itraconazole), glucocorticoids, alfentanil (Alfenta), cisapride (Propulsid), fentanyl (Sublimaze), lidocaine (Xylocaine), losartan (Cozaar), fexofenadine (Allegra), midazolam (Versed), and others."
https://www.rxlist.com/turmeric/supplements.htm#Interactions