Tumeric spice compound blocks cancer
Curcumin, a compound found in the spice turmeric, can block the biological pathway to melanoma and other cancers in the laboratory, according to researchers at the University of Texas (UT).
Dr Bharat Aggarwal, said that the university’s clinical research had made available “not only the master switch to turn off cancer, but also a cure for it. It was already known that curcumin can prevent cancer. Now it can also be used to cure cancer”.
“We are providing evidence that curcumin can work on at least one dozen cancers.In fact, let’s put it this way: we have not found a single cancer on which curcumin doesn’t work,” Dr.Aggarwal said.
Turmeric is a rhizome of the plant curcuma longa. The medicinal use of this plant has been well documented in the 5,000-year-old traditional Indian Ayurvedic medicine system where it has long been used as a food preservative, a colouring agent, a spice to flavour food and as a folk medicine to cleanse the body.
Two to five per cent of turmeric contains curcumin. Because of turmeric’s extensive use in foods in India and Pakistan, the incidence of cancer, especially breast, colon prostate and lung, was a lot less in those countries. And because south Indians used turmeric more widely than north Indians, “the prevalence of cancer is less among them than among north Indians,” Dr Aggarwal said.
