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Comment by will_brown | Hacker News Reader

>As far as I know the human body absorbs pretty much all the nutrition from the food it consumes

Not even close, especially when it comes to vitamins, nutrients and minerals. For example, take turmeric which is praised for its anti-inflammatory and anti-oxidant benefits...we will usually not readily absorb the active ingredients unless taken together with black pepper.

Black pepper will also improve nutrient availability in general, because it helps digestive enzyme secretion.

Another example is iron, which generally we readily absorb from meat but not plants, however, consuming iron rich plants together with vitamin c improves our iron absorption up to 6x.

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Is there any clinical research showing improved health outcomes for combining black pepper with turmeric?

There are published human and animal Studies showing that piperine enhances serum concentration, extent of absorption and bioavailability of curcumin by 2,000%.

Yes but is there any hard evidence that leads to improved health outcomes in humans?

What’s “hard evidence”?

There are no shortage of published studies about the health benefits in humans. You might start with “Curcumin: A review of its effects on Human Health”. “Research suggests that curcumin can help in the management of oxidative and inflammatory conditions, metabolic syndrome, arthritis, Anxiety, and hyperlipidemia.” The same study finds it may also help with exercise induced inflammation and muscle soreness, speeding up recovery in active people and a low dose can provide health benefits for people who have no diagnosed Heath conditions. Available at ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

UCLA just published a study that curcumin improves memory and mood.

I think what he's asking for is long term epidemiological studies, which are hard to come by. I'd have to see the studies you are referring to, but most likely they refer to measurements occurring over a relatively short time period, on a relatively small sample size (or in a lab on animals, or just cells, etc. etc.). This stuff is totally valid, but a lot of it is really hard to detect at a large scale level. You can justify many kinds of diets by looking at the short term biological impact of them, but the reality is that if these diets are so much better it shouldn't be so difficult to detect them in epidemiological studies. The classic example is the widely misinterpreted "China Study" which many people use to justify a vegetarian diet, but in fact did the opposite by proving that the effect size of eating red meat, while statistically significant, was literally 2 orders of magnitude below what would be considered clinically relevant at an epidemiological scale.

Well I didn’t make a single claim as to the medical/health benefits of turmeric/curcumin anyway, not sure why he asked period.

My point is about absorption, and curcumin is the perfect example of my point, by itself it isn’t bioavailable but studies provide “hard evidence” that black pepper makes curcumin 2000x more bioavailable.

nu·tri·ent

noun

a substance that provides nourishment essential for growth and the maintenance of life.

Turmeric isn't a nutrient. I'm talking about fats, sugars, proteins, which your body hoards every bit of no matter how much is eaten in one meal or spaced out. Of course there are exceptions like if you drink a gallon of oil and you get oily diarrhea, but a normal person absorbs all the calories and energy that is available from the food they consume.

Iron has its own regulation system of absorption and excretion, based on the iron status of the individual. If only we had those checks and balances on our caloric intake!

Yes, turmeric isn’t a nutrient, it’s a spice made up of nutrients.

Believe it or not vitamins and minerals are nutrients.

In nutrition science vitamins and minerals are generally referred to as micronutrients whereas fats, sugars, proteins are referred to as macronutrients.

And no macros are not all absorbed the same. As a general rule the longer someone’s intestines the more macro absorption they will have than someone with a shorter intestinal track. As I have already suggested digestive enzymes play a role, so if someone ate black pepper as I suggested before, that will secrete more digestive enzymes allowing for more absorption of calories and macros. There is also gut bacteria (microbiome) take for example the study of African twins where one is healthy and the other malnourished, where it was determined the malnourished twin with the same diet wasn’t absorbing the same amount of nutrients as the healthy twin because of the difference in their microbiome.

I'm sorry but you really don't know what you are talking about. I think you have accumulated a lot of repeated information from blogs and shoddy websites instead of from science.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=calories+black+pep...

This is the only reference I see in pubmed for calories and black pepper and it says black pepper raises the resting metabolic rate, nothing about absorption. And it shows black pepper reducing obesity which would be the opposite of what you are describing.

>”piperine is the major active component of black pepper and, when combined in a complex with curcumin, has been shown to increase bioavailability by 2000%.” https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5664031/

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