"Which Spices Fight Inflammation?"
Once in a while I come across a study that's so juicy,
I do an entire video about it.
It's like my which-fruit-fights -cancer-better video,
or "the best cooking method" one,
or that one comparing thousands of foods.
Well, this is one such study.
A group of researchers at U of F, Gainesville and Penn State,
set up an elegant experiment.
We've known ounce per ounce,
that herbs and spices have some of the greatest
antioxidant activities known, but that's in a test tube.
Before we can ask if an herb or spice has health benefits,
it's first necessary to determine whether it's bioavailable.
This has never been done, until now.
They could have went the easy route
and just measured the change in antioxidant level
in one's bloodstream before and after consumption,
but the assumption that the appearance of antioxidant activity
in the blood is an indicator of bioavailability has a weakness.
Maybe more gets absorbed than we think,
but doesn't show up on antioxidant tests
because it gets bound up to proteins or cells.
So they attempted to measure
physiological changes in the blood.
They were interested in whether absorbed compounds
would be able to protect white blood cells
from an oxidative or inflammatory injury,
whether it would protect the strands of our DNA
from breaking when confronted by free radicals.
They also wondered if the consumption of herbs and spices
might alter cellular inflammatory responses
in the presence of a physiologically
relevant inflammatory insult.
What does this all mean?
What they did was take a bunch of people
and had each of them eat
different types of spices for a week.
There are so many really unique things about this study,
but one was that the quantity that study subjects consumed
was based on the usual levels of consumption in actual food.
Like the oregano group was given a half teaspoon a day—
the kinds of practical quantities
people might actually eat once in awhile.
Then at the end of the week they drew blood
from the dozen or so people they had
adding black pepper to their diets that week,
and compared the effects of their blood
to the effects of the blood of the dozen
on cayenne, or cinnamon, or cloves, or cumin.
They had about 10 different groups of people
eating about 10 different spices.
Then they dripped their plasma
(the liquid fraction of their blood)
onto human white blood cells in a petri dish
that had been exposed to an inflammatory insult.
They wanted to pick something really inflammatory
so they chose oxidized cholesterol,
which is like what you'd get in your bloodstream
after eating something like fried chicken.
So they jabbed the white blood cells
with oxidized cholesterol and then measured
how much TNF they produced in response.
Tumor necrosis factor is a powerful inflammatory cytokine,
infamous for the role it plays in autoimmune attacks
like inflammatory bowel disease.
Compared to the blood of those
who ate no spices for a week,
was the blood of those eating black pepper
able to significantly dampen the inflammatory response?
No.
What about any of these other spices?
Cloves, ginger, rosemary, and turmeric
were able to significantly stifle the inflammatory response.
And remember, they weren't dripping the spices themselves
on these human white blood cells,
but the blood of those who ate the spices
and so represents what might happen
when cells in our body are exposed to the levels of spices
that circulate in our bloodstream after normal daily consumption.
Not megadoses in some pill,
just the amount that makes your spaghetti sauce taste good,
or your pumpkin pie or curry sauce.
There are drugs that can do the same thing.
Tumor necrosis factors are such major mediators
of inflammation and inflammation-related diseases
that there are these TNF blocking drugs on the market
for the treatment of inflammatory diseases
like osteoarthritis, inflammatory bowel disease,
psoriasis, and ankylosing spondylitis,
which rake in, collectively, more than $20 billion a year,
because drug companies charge people
$15,000–$20,000 a year for the drug.
At that price, the side effects better be hugs and rainbows,
but no, these drugs carry a black label warning
because they can cause things like,
hmm, cancer and heart failure.
If only there were a cheaper, safer solution.
Curcumin, the yellow pigment in turmeric
a spice that's a tad cheaper and safer,
but does it work outside of a test tube?
There's evidence that it may help in all the diseases
for which TNF blockers are currently being used,
and so with health-care costs and safety being such major issues,
this golden spice turmeric may help provide the solution.