Health Benefits of Turmeric and Its Nutrition

Turmeric root is considered as among the most widely used spices in Asia, particularly the South Asian region. The captivating color yellow of turmeric has surely inspired a lot of cultures for it to be used as a dye. It is also used as the major ingredient to be utilized in curry powder. Teas, powders, capsules, and extracts are regarded as some turmeric products that are available on a commercial scale.

Curcumin is regarded as among the active ingredients to be used in turmeric that comes with a lot of positive biological properties. The ayurvedic medication also recommends using turmeric as a beneficial root for a lot of health conditions. Some of the conditions include inflammation and chronic pain. What’s more, we also see it getting popularity as a healing agent and a pain reliever in Western medicine.

Nutrition Properties of Turmeric

A full tablespoon of ground turmeric contains only 29 calories in total, with one gram of plant protein 6 grams of carbs, out of which 2 grams come from fiber. What’s more, turmeric also contains a lot of potassium, phosphorus, and manganese. Turmeric also has a lot of nutrients in it, which helps you stay healthy and strong.

Ayurvedic medicine recommends utilizing turmeric as an agent to provide relief from inflammation from the inside to the out. Some of the beneficial uses of turmeric include the prevention of cancer and its treatment against infections and rheumatoid arthritis.

Curcumin, which is a substance found in turmeric, is subjected to more research against treatment and prevention of cancer. With more extensive research, we will be able to recognize its effects on different versions.

In the past, turmeric was added to fabric dyes. Now, research has brought a lot of innovations, and now we see its role in the prevention, treatment, and management against cystic fibrosis, neurological diseases, and cystic fibrosis.

Health Benefits of Turmeric:

As you can see, the nutrition profile of turmeric points to the many health benefits it has. Some major health benefits of using turmeric in your diet include the following:

1) Prevents Inflammation

The process of inflammation in your body is a natural response to foreign attackers and has an important role in the repair of the damage going on in your body. Inflammation in the short term is beneficial, and it might be a concern given it gets chronic and starts attacking your body’s tissues. This chronic inflammation might play a role in some human health conditions as well as diseases.

2) Increases Antioxidant Capacity

Some of the main mechanisms behind a lot of diseases such as aging include oxidative damage in the body. The oxidative stress in the body results in a lot of free radicals present in the body, where highly reactive substances having unpaired electrons damage the tissues of the body. The free radicals may react with the organic substances, including different proteins, fatty acids, and DNA.

The actual reason the antioxidants are so helpful for the body is that these substances help protect your body against free radicals. The curcumin found in turmeric is an antioxidant that helps in the neutralization of free radicals because of its chemical structure of it. What’s more, there are a lot of scientific studies explaining curcumin to be blocking the action of the free radicals, stimulating the action of antioxidants. However, there is a need for more studies in humans in order to conform to these advantages.

3) Curcumin Might Boost Neurotrophic Factor

Before explorers got a more in-depth understanding of brain cells, people believed that they were not able to actually divide as well as multiple after childhood. This didn’t seem to be in context with the facts based on recent studies. Neurons are highly capable of making new connections, and in a lot of areas of the mind, they are able to get multiplied.

Among the main drivers of the scientific process is the BDNF or the brain-derived neurotrophic factor, which serves to be a gene involved in creating a protein to promote neuron health. This protein has a role to play in learning and memory, and it can also be found in different brain areas responsible for body weight, drinking, and eating.

A lot of disorders of the brain have been associated with the lowered levels of the BDNF protein, including Alzheimer’s disease as well as depression. On an interesting note, animal studies suggest that curcumin might improve the brain levels of BDNF.

With this, it might become effective in the delay or even reversal of the brain disease as well as the decrease in the overall functioning of the brain. However, there is a need for more research as those studies were conducted in animals and not actual human cells.

It also seems that this effect may improve attention and memory, which seems to be logically provided its effects on the protein levels.

4) It Might Lower Your Heart Disease Risk

Heart disease is considered to be the most common chronic disease globally. Researchers have extensively studied it for a lot of years and realized the cause behind it. There are a lot of multifactorial reasons that explain why heart disease occurs in subjects.

Curcumin might play a helpful role in reversing the steps involved in the process of heart disease. However, the actual benefit behind curcumin, as it comes to cardiovascular disease risk, is improving the overall function of the endothelium, which is the lining of the blood vessels.

What’s more, one of the main drivers of cardiovascular diseases is endothelial dysfunction. It is when the endothelium is not able to regulate the blood clotting, blood pressure, and a diversity of different factors in your body. There are several studies suggesting that curcumin might lead to different improvements in heart health. What’s more, a study showed that the ingredient is thought to be the same effect as an exercise in women of the post-menopausal period.

5) It Might Prevent Cancer

Cancer comes as a chronic condition with no cell growth uncontrolled. Cancer comes with a lot of different forms which might get influenced by curcumin, and it has been shown. What’s more, curcumin is studied as a herb in the treatment of cancer and is found to influence the development and growth of cancer.

There are lots of studies showing that turmeric might help in the contribution of the death of unhealthy tumor cells, reduction in angiogenesis, which is the growth of the blood vessels happening in tumors, and the reduction of metastasis or cancer spread.

Piperine, along with a high dose of curcumin, is also studied against the spread of cancer. However, more detailed research is needed on the subject. However, evidence suggests that it also helps in the prevention of cancer in the first place, most importantly the different cancers in the digestive system such as colorectal cancer.

A study conducted on 44 subjects having colonic lesions with metastasis properties showed that the induction of 4g curcumin every day alleviated the total lesion number up to 40%.

6) It Might Be Supportive for Alzheimer’s Treatment

Alzheimer’s Disease is considered as the dementia common form, contributing up to 70% of total dementia cases. Although there are some treatments available for these symptoms, preventing the symptoms in the first place is also considered to be important. There might be good news soon regarding this hypothesis as the agent is evident for crossing the blood-brain barrier in the body. It is shown that oxidative stress, as well as inflammation, might play a contributing factor in this disease. Luckily, curcumin addresses both of these concerns.

What’s more, Alzheimer’s disease feature also involves an overall building up of the different amyloid plaques in the form of protein tangles in the brain. Curcumin, on the contrary, clears the plaques. Although these studies have been shown to show a positive influence of turmeric on the brain, more extensive research is definitely needed in this regard.

7) Fights Depression

Turmeric is also known to fight against depression. A study with 60 people having depression studied the effect of curcumin against Prozac only and Prozac given with curcumin on depression. After a span of 6 weeks, it was shown that curcumin led to positive improvement in similarity to Prozac. The group taking both the agents showed the best benefits.

Depression is also associated with alleviated levels of the BDNF protein as well as a shrinking hippocampus, which is a brain area concerning memory as well as learning. Turmeric may aid in boosting the BDNF levels, which helps reverse the changes going on. Some evidence also claims turmeric boosts the dopamine and serotonin brain neurotransmitters.

Final Word

These are some of the essential health benefits of turmeric, which come from its amazing nutrition profile. The compound found in turmeric, especially curcumin, has a profound role in the activity of several things, including mental health, heart disease, and cancer prevention, among many other things.