If anyone asks you as a parent who your favourite child is, we all know the correct answer is you don’t have one, you love them all equally.
Buuuuuuut, you know, love is a multifaceted thing, it comes in different shapes and sizes.
I love all our supplements in our bespoke neuro-mechanical nutrition range, but there is a pair coming to you soon, that are a bit special, a set of non-identical twins.
We call them Curcumin and Boswellia – in my head, Curcumin is a boy and Boswellia a girl, both really posh and I am adopting them.
Now when it comes to supplements, if you are going to make claims in front of me, you better have some research to back it up.
In this day and age, evidence is currency.
Show me your money (evidence) or pipe down.
And when it comes to curcumin (the pigment from turmeric), there are millions of people talking a good game, but as far as I can see, only one company delivering.
You cannot move for companies selling turmeric/curcumin with every claim going for health.
The vast majority of these will be in your gut and out the other end with no systemic effect at all.
The issue is, curcumin is fat soluble but poorly soluble in water.
Taking curcumin from turmeric gives very little into your blood at all.
Does pepper (bioperine) help? Yes it does.
But it’s all relative and still pretty poor.
What they need to be is encased in a fatty phospholipid complex. It needs no active digestion, and goes straight into the blood.
This gives our formulation 29 times the absorption of normal turmeric – that is 2,900% higher.
And then, straight into the cell.
After all, that is where we want it, in the cell, turning down inflammation.
We use a derivative of a liposome, called a PHYTOSOME.
A liposomal, is what we use for our HYDROXO B12 product, with the B12 encased in a phospholipid bilayer.
But a PHYTOSOME is where the active ingredient is integrated into the head of the phospholipid.
Here the curcumin is represented by the green triangle.
Remember, the cell membrane is a phospholipid bilayer.
So, the curcumin PHYTOSOME, also a phospholipid bilayer, delivers the curcumin right into the cell.
The reality is 99% of the curcumin on the market has never, EVER been tested on humans in a clinical trial with meaningful outcomes, with a comparison or control group.
95% of the products will declare they have pepper (bioperine) added to enhance absorption, but they have never actually tested their formula on humans or animals.
That is partly why they use such huge doses, to try and look good, despite most of it going through them and out with your poo.
A small number have tested a specialised formula for absorption into the blood and will market that.
Ironically in this case, the company also sells the “standard curcumin”.
But getting it into the blood is all well and good but does it do anything clinically meaningful?
Again, even most of the tested for absorption formulas have little to no actual human studies with conditions that we would care about with meaningful changes at the end.
Most are simply using other brands’ research to say “ours works like theirs”.
Here is but one sample of the research we have to back up our Curcumin formula, on osteoarthritis in the knee, using 1000 mg of curcumin, over an 8 month period (note this was an extension of the original 3 months study to show the benefits were maintained.
They used the WOMAC score for pain and disability for the knee OA and after 8 months the curcumin group had a total of 58% reduction in pain and disability.
And with less pain, comes less medication.
And their inflammatory markers were down as you would expect.
Note these patients have an ongoing, degenerative process, and they are not 100% pain free, it isn’t a magical wand and we are not offering miracle cures.
But 58% less pain, a 63% drop in NSAID’s and all the complications that come with those is as good as it gets. If ther was a drug that could do that, it owuld be front page news.
Remember, that is only one of our dynamic duo, Boswellia is still to come and play.
Over the next few weeks, we will look more and more at how these two patented formulas are going to change your patients’ lives for the better. – and I will prove it.
The twins will look like this, & they are due out in around 4 weeks’ time.
