How Turmeric May Improve Type 2 Diabetes

Many years ago, a doctor friend of mine who was selling supplements told me about the benefits of turmeric on health and aging. I was told that there was nothing turmeric couldn’t cure! The list included arthritis, heart disease, cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer’s disease, and many others. It seemed like a panacea, something I’ve heard before – but these promises are never fulfilled. I was skeptical, and never did any searching to see.

Now, years later, I work for a company that sells turmeric! When I first began researching turmeric, I found that it was a good anti-inflammatory, such as might be obtained from ibuprofen. I studied its absorption and utilization; turmeric needs to be “cooked” and is best absorbed with black pepper. So, I helped create the supplement that is as good as, or better than, any on the market, TurmericBP+. Now, I am doing more research about the benefit of turmeric for other illnesses, such as for type 2 diabetes. I have said turmeric might help inflammation, but now I see a lot of studies to show many more benefits.

Turmeric Studies May Not Be Reliable

It is common for a company to create a supplement from a natural ingredient and then pay for a bunch of studies to prove it will cure everything. I don’t know if any of you remember the resveratrol debacle? A researcher was paid to show that resveratrol would erase heart disease, even if the rats ate junk food. Essentially, its effectiveness was all made up. There is so much fabricated research for pharmaceutical drugs that the editor of the most prestigious medical journal in the world said she could not trust anything published in the New England Journal of Medicine.[1] The Lancet, probably the second most prestigious journal, recently published an article that hydroxychloroquine was dangerous and didn’t work for COVID-19. But they later admitted it was completely fabricated.[2] It is obvious I can’t trust medical journals, and I can’t trust supplement research. So, how do I go about finding any truth?

I was gratified to find a great deal of research on turmeric including thousands of studies over many decades. There are animal and human studies. Most of them are not paid for by a marketing company. Funding comes from government research grants or non-profits. I also didn’t find much conflict-of-interest in these studies. Some of them were student projects, supervised by university professors. Moreover, some research comes from India, while others come out of Europe, China, and the United States. Moreover, they are in all sorts of medical journals including nutrition, medical, supplement, and specialty journals. Thus, I tend to find the bulk of the research on turmeric to be reliable.

Turmeric for Diabetes

One study from India demonstrated that turmeric