Long story short, my wife is blessed with a multitude of ailments (some serious) and a friend recommended Turmeric as a aid for a couple of issues. I, being the dutiful husband, have volunteered to also try it out. Single tablet about 600mg of the active ingredients and plain old turmeric (biggest seller yada yada yada). There are supposed to be big issues around absorbing the stuff and it often comes suspended in oil with black pepper that has ingredients to help it into your system - not the stuff we currently have (ÂŁ9< for 365 tablets).
Odd thing is, taking it with Huel appears to increase how much gets into the system significantly. My wife prefers food to Huel and isn’t experiencing anything out of the usual, however I am experiencing brightly coloured urine, a significant burn when passing solids and the weirdest thing, an effect on my tear ducts. About an hour after quaffing my Huel breakfast and downing a pill my eyes get watery and it stings mildly. Like it does if you get mint in or around your eyes. Passes in about an hour. I came off it for a couple of days to see if it was my imagination or some infection, but it stopped immediately, start again and the symptoms return.
So Huel seems to be some sort of super carrier for Turmeric!
However the Turmeric itself is having absolutely no effect on my wife’s conditions or my health (two weeks in). I’ll report more if anything impressive happens
I don’t think tumeric is a standalone answer. Being Indian myself we put ground tumeric into basically every traditional dish we cook, its there to help as anti imflammatory, along with a whole host of other spices and seeds which form the base of 99% of our dishes.
When someone in our community wants to use tumeric to help an ailment (internal) they typically use fresh tumeric which they pickle using lemon juice, or for joint and muscular pain they make a tumeric rub and wrap it around the body part to ease pain and swelling.
Personally having had it all my life I can’t really say it makes much of a difference when its ground, however when its fresh I have found that it helped my sprained ankle swelling and also helped me battle a fair few bouts of flu by finely dicing and adding to hot water with fresh lemon honey and fresh ginger.
Update, still taking it, though moved to a more highly recommended version. As for health, I haven’t noticed anything but my wife’s health continues to improve. But as she is currently trying both turmeric and applying magnesium creams and sprays either or both could be helping (or it could be a coincidence). Incidentally the magnesium creams have had a profound effect on her arms which were in so much cramp she could no longer pick up a cup of tea - she has some very odd symptoms and is now being investigate by a doctor who specialises in “mystery diseases” - his words
I hope that the tumeric you have been taking was something the doctor told you to do. Tumeric has been given a sort of panacea status in the alternative medicine community. The effects of it have been studied but it still needs more research.
Matthew, no more a coming together of experiences of people we know. The main reason we’re doing it is for my wife who has a complex medical history. She is also using a number of creams and has many prescribed drugs. We just thought we’d give it a try and truth be told she has seen a great improvement. It’s too long and boring to go into but the medical profession have given her a diagnosis which basically means they have no idea what’s going on, so were using a lot of research and observation to try and narrow down what might work. We’ve tried a few things which didn’t work but have recently discovered that magnesium in the form of external creams, salt baths and sprays have a massive effect on her muscle issues and the turmeric appears to be helping with the swelling. It’s only one tablet a day, so the chances of any harm are practically nothing.
I’m taking the turmeric because - why not, seems to be good for a few things and unless you have an allergy to the stuff it’s not going to do anymore harm than all the curry I ate when I lived in Bradford (hint: that’s all I ate in Bradford). I’ve personally met and talked to two Cancer and one MS survivor who put their recovery and on going good health down to it. When you hear their story (esp the people with Cancer), it’s hard not to give it some credence - it either worked or the placebo effect performed miracles…
As you say, the jury is still out on it. Some research recently concluded that research methods weren’t sufficient to understand the effects due to the chemical complexities of the compounds involved - all very interesting.
Cool sounds like you are taking a level headed approach to things and actually seeing what the results are and I’d guess that as a lot of things don’t work you are going to minimise the placebo effect.
