[music] Researchers at the Arizona Health
Sciences Center are discovering that the root of the Turmeric plant used for centuries in
cooking and in ayurvedic medicine is effective against some inflammatory diseases. Turmeric is a spice that's used, it's
what causes curries to be orange, and it's traditionally used a lot in Indian
cooking but it's also used traditionally in Indian medical systems and it's used
specifically for inflammatory things like colds, sore throats, and arthritis. Dr. Janet Funk is a clinical endo-crinologist at
the University of Arizona College of Medicine.
With support from the national institutes
of health, she studied Turmeric to see if it is useful in treating arthritis. In her lab, she found that
it prevented arthritis by blocking an inflammatory
response in the body. Turmeric attacks something early on. We know that same pathway is
important in a lot of other diseases. Dr. Funk recently teamed with Dr. Leslie
Ritter, coordinator for the Stroke Center at University Medical Center to see if
Turmeric might help stroke patients. Their research has shown that
Turmeric can reduce the inflammation that complicates the effects of
stroke and may even be preventative.
Are more curries in order? or Turmeric supplements? As we know in laboratory
models, it works very well. But still, there's no clinical
trials with people showing that they work and that they're safe. Turmeric that we buy at the grocery store
and that we use in cooking is basically comes from the Turmeric rhizome and they dry it
and grind it up and that's Turmeric powder that you buy in the spice
section at the grocery store.
When you go to the store to buy turmeric as
a dietary supplement, it comes in a pill form and it's not just the dried
rhizome put in a pill, rather, instead they take the dried rhizome,
they extract it with various chemicals to get just a small part of it so that
one pill, one dietary supplement pill of turmeric is usually equal to
this much of the dried powder. So what you buy is very different
then what you use in cooking. These are just different capsules that
we've opened up and we've looked at them to see what they're composed of and
just looking at their colors you can see that they're not all the same and when you go to
the health foods store, you can't really tell.
There's not enough information given to
you to figure out what's in a given capsule because that's just the way they're regulated. In their lab, Dr. Funk and Dr. Ritter
used turmeric extracts that are isolated and prepared specifically for them so
they know exactly what they are testing, what works, and how. Additional research and clinical
trials in the future may prove that turmeric is an effective
therapy for many of our ills..
