[Homestead] Update on health: turmeric and milk thistle

sjc indexer at fairpoint.net
Mon Feb 2 18:12:49 EST 2009


EarthNSky wrote:
> I recall you saying that he said it must be eaten with fats. That 
> implies that one eat turmeric the spice, and not use the extra 
> supplement that you buy in the store. The extracted curcumin pills 
> obviously have no fat-they left the fat behind in the process.<g>. 
> Asto other dietary fats, I have also increased my intake of Omega 3 
> and 6 fatty acids by eating more sardines and fish in general, so 
> perhaps that helped.
If I just said "with fats", I offer my apologies, because what he 
actually said was more along the line of 'heated with fats, as in the 
dietary usage'.  He also offered his opinion that it was on the order of 
10 times more effective used that way.  I haven't, of course, tried it, 
but even if a portion were consumed that way, seems it would cut down on 
the need for the encapsulated version. 

He explained the change it undergoes but my focus was elsewhere, I 
guess, because that didn't 'stick' in my brain; I just remember thinking 
of soy and its traditional Eastern usage (almost always fermented) and 
the Western mess made of the soybean.....Although he didn't make the 
comparison, he did go on some about its (turmeric) traditional Asian 
usage and the way it's used now in the West, as a 'straight' dose of 
herb.  He considers the use of the ground version as available here to 
be of negligible benefit.

If, though, in all the research you did about it, that never showed up, 
maybe not worth bothering with.....

It would soon seem to be 'medicine', though, in either usage---a little 
like garlic, which I like and use regularly but when I get too much 
people start fussing at me....lucky I live by myself, maybe.  I do cut 
back on it considerably when I know I'm going to be gone, and 
fortunately, it doesn't take too long to get rid of it, just a couple of 
days.  Plus you can eat quite a bit of garlic before it starts to work 
its way through.  And I remember my kids smelling like walking vitamin 
tablets when they were little, from the extra B trying to ward off marsh 
mosquitoes.

SJ








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