Many people who follow health trends know about Turmeric, but to the average consumer, you may have no idea why this orange-colored spice has started showing up EVERYWHERE! The truth is, turmeric is great for you and there’s a secret little compound inside that has more health benefits than you can imagine! Read on for more information!
What is Turmeric?
Turmeric is a spice typically used in Indian cooking. Basically, it’s the spice that makes curry orange. But the Indians are no dummies because they’ve been using this spice for years both in their cooking and medicinally, and consequently, they’ve been benefiting from all of it’s amazing health benefits. But what is the secret component of turmeric that makes it so good for you?
Curcumin!
Curcumin is a curcuminoid and it’s the most important and effective one found in turmeric. Curcumin is a powerful anti-oxidant with incredible anti-inflammatory abilities.
Benefits of Turmeric and Curcumin
So let’s talk about the antioxidant ability of curcumin. Not only does curcumin provide antioxidants, but it also improves your body’s own antioxidant ability. This means that it helps your body fight free radicals, which are nasty little substances that cause havoc all over your body. Free radicals can also lead to cancer so anything you can do to combat those substances is a win.
Curcumin is also extremely effective at reducing inflammation in the body. Essentially, it attacks chronic inflammation at the molecular level and prevents inflammation in the first place. This is important because chronic inflammation can lead to many diseases, including arthritis, Alzheimer’s disease, cancer, and heart disease.
It can also improve inflammation found in your joints, or arthritis. Many people who experience arthritis get relief from the inflammation itself, as well as the pain associated with arthritis.
Curcumin also improves brain function because it increases levels of Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor (BDNF), which is a type of growth hormone found in your brain. Essentially, this means that not only can curcumin improve brain function, but it can also improve memory, increase your brain’s ability to process information and reduce your risk for Alzheimer’s disease and other degenerative diseases.
Curcumin has a ton of other benefits for your body, but these are the greatest. And as you can imagine, when you improve things like chronic inflammation and antioxidant ability, you clear up tons of other issues that can result.
How Do You Get Curcumin?
You can always use turmeric in your cooking like the Indians and benefit from the curcumin. There are plenty of recipes you can addit to, and it doesn’t just have to include Indian cuisine. I’ve added it to chilis, soups, rice or quinoa, stirfry, etc. However, if you really want it to be really effective, you should take it as a supplement.
Turmeric itself only contains about 3% of curcumin, by weight, but if you take it in a supplement form, you can get a much higher dose and therefore, benefit even more from it’s amazing abilities.
It also helps to consume turmeric with black pepper because the pepper contains a substance called piperine, a.k.a. bioperine, which increases your body’s ability to absorb curcumin by 2000%!
Finally, you can also drink turmeric and benefit from the curcumin it contains in tea form. i personally like turmeric or curcumin tea, but there are plenty of people out there who don’t, so I would recommend trying them all and see what works for you.
And there you have it! Now you know why so many people are going crazy for curcumin and why you should, too!