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Comment by jk27277 | Hacker News Reader

Interesting. Afaik Indians have a very low Alzheimer risk supposely because of curcurma. My friend claimed curcuma also mildens Alzheimer syndromes. This made me Google if curcuma helps against herpes. It does!

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2668156/

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Curcumin is one of those compounds that does everything, that's not necessarily a good thing, it is a hit in every assay. When you google compounds and they are antifungal, antidiabetic, antibacterial, anticancer, etc., it isn't a reason to get excited, they have no specificity.

Source: I work in natural products chemistry.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan-assay_interference_compoun...

http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2017/01/12/cur...

I also hate the term anticancer which gets tossed around a lot. Everything that is toxic to human cells is anticancer which is what chemotherapy does. If we found a substance that wasn't toxic to normal cells and killed cancer cells, we'd have a safe cure for cancer.

Amazing health breakthrough! Our product Nature Farms Pure Organic Battery Acid kills one hundred percent of cancer cells in lab tests!

Pure organic is great, but I won't use batteries unless they are vegan.

I'm not sure I completely trust research done on HeLa cells. Those things are seriously weird.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HeLa

PS: On the other hand, if something kills those things..

Know what's really funny? Iodine kills HeLa cells, but according to this paper that's a problem:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24219135

Iodine has been claimed to induce apoptosis in a number of cancer types while remaining harmless to normal cells.

Interesting, I wonder if it's linked with thyroid hormones. In culture, that would seem odd, unless it's binding to receptors in a manner that hormones would, or competing with hormones in the growth serum?

I'm only a make-believe biologist.

I'm beginning to think the thyroid hormones are just a storage mechanism for iodine. The hormones T1, T2, T3, and T4 are actually named for the number of Iodine atoms in the molecule.

Normal curcuma (aka tumeric) only contains about 2.5% of the actual beneficial compound curcumin. But curcumin is indeed amazing, not only does it help with Alzheimer’s, it also has anti-tumor, blood sugar regulating and fat controlling properties.

I saw a rando blog article out there about an old paper studying the components of tumeric. They found it had lots of components each with separate benefits. Unfortunately, the conclusion of the paper was “We should separate all the components so that we can market and sell the same tumeric 10 times!”

Obligatory mention of how piperine (black pepper extract) is necessary for bioavailability.

Black pepper is not necessary. There are extracted forms with patented formulas that have studies showing possibly increased effectiveness compared to black pepper. Theracurmin and Longvida

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