"Turmeric Curcumin Reprogramming Cancer Cell Death"
The anticancer effects of the turmeric pigment curcumin
extend well beyond it's ability to block carcinogens.
The anticancer effects of curcumin mainly result from
the multitude of ways it regulates programmed cell death.
It's estimated that human body consists of 10 or so trillion cells,
that's a million million.
Almost all of these cells get turned over within approximately 100 days.
We're like a new person, every three months!
We reinvent ourselves physically.
And since we're just made up of 3 things
air, water, and food - those are the only inputs -
we are what we eat literally, physically!
In a sense, our body has to rebuild itself every three months
with the building materials we deliver to it through our stomach.
Our mouths are like the access road
to the continual construction site to our body.
Trucks roll in 3 times a day.
What do we want them to deliver?
Some shoddy cheap stuff we scrounged around for
or bought at the discount outlets that's just going to fall apart?
Or do we want to build our foundation solid?
We are each walking around inside
the greatest known architectural structures in the universe!
Let's not ruin such grand blueprints by consuming junk.
Anyway, we only own the biological real estate we're born with,
so if need to rebuild every three months, we also need a wrecking crew.
If we're replacing 10 trillion every hundred days,
that means we have to kill off like 100 billion cells every day, normally.
Out with the old, in with the new.
We do that primarily through a process called apoptosis,
pre-programmed cell death,
from the Greek "ptosis" meaning falling,
and "apo" meaning away from.
So it's our cells falling away from our body.
For example, we all used to have webbed fingers and toes, literally.
Each one of us in the womb until about 4 months,
and then the apoptosis kicks in
and the cells in the webbing in between kill themselves off to separate our fingers.
Some cells in our body overstay their welcome, though,
like cancer cells.
They don't die when they're supposed to
by somehow turning off their suicide genes.
What can we do about it?
Well, one of the ways curry kills cancer cells,
is by reprogramming the self-destruct mechanism back into cancer cells.
Let me just run through one of these pathways,
just to see the complexity. FAS, is a so-called death receptor,
which activates the FAS associated death domain,
along with death receptor 5, and death receptor 4.
FADD then activates caspase-8,
which ignites the death machine, and kills the cell.
Where does curry powder fit into all this?
In cancer cells, curcumin, the pigment in the spice turmeric
that makes curry powder yellow,
upregulates and activates death receptors,
as has been demonstrated in human kidney cancer cells
as well as skin cancer, and nose and throat cancer.
It can also activate the death machine directly,
as has been shown in lung cancer and colon cancer.
Caspases are so-called executioner enzymes,
that when activated, destroy the cancer cell from within
by chopping up proteins left and right,
kind of a death by a thousand cuts.
And that's just one pathway.
Here's all the other ways curcumin can affect apoptosis.
Here's all the different types of cancer cells curcumin can kill,
but it tends to leave normal cells alone
for reasons that are not fully understood.
Overall, this review showed that curcumin can kill
a wide variety of tumor cell types through diverse mechanisms.
And it's because curcumin can affect numerous mechanisms
of cell death at the same time,
it's possible that cancer cells may not easily develop resistance
to curcumin-induced cell death,
like they do to most chemotherapy.
Furthermore, its ability to kill tumor cells and not normal cells
makes curcumin an attractive candidate… for supper?
Can't make money on some spice you can buy anywhere.
An attractive candidate for drug development.