Mohan vowed: "I’ll never put another supplement in my body again."
Yeah. Isn't there a thing called water poisoning? Where your body sheds lots of things that it needs if you drink too much water? I'd wager a guess that if you drink >20 liters of water daily you'll be in some trouble...
Weasel words included because they're necessary... Health is complicated
I looked on my table toward the bottle of turmeric my parents gifted me recently, saying they heard it was good and bought on a famous "health" store.
Bottle is: turmeric + pepper "designed for max absorption" and dose is 10000mg.
It's worse in the US because the FDA effectively "washes its hands" of anything deemed a "supplement". In general, the precautionary principle is difficult to find in America outside of FDA-approved procedures, medical devices, and medications. Food and supplements are desperately under-regulated.
The "natural" supplement industry lobbied for, and obtained, a law that makes them unregulatable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dietary_Supplement_Health_and_... ("Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994")
> "The act was intended to exempt the dietary and herbal supplement industry from most FDA drug regulations, allowing them to be sold and marketed without scientific backing for their health and medical claims.[3]"
See Article 6 and on: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2006/1924/oj/eng
The article made it up. It's pure speculation. Hundreds of thousands of people take pepper+curcumin supplements and are totally fine.
What's likely the culprit here is an idiosyncratic immune response, or a heavy metal contaminated supplement. Of course, that's also speculative. Could be something she ate; could be that she didn't disclose a drinking problem.
The article reads like it has an axe to grind, tbh. "Oh no an unregulated racket!"
“Importantly, means of increasing the bioavailability of curcumin were developed using piperine (black pepper) or lipid nanoparticle delivery methods to increase absorption. These high bioavailability forms of purified curcumin were subsequently linked to several cases of liver injury and mentioned as a possible cause of outbreaks of acute hepatitis with jaundice in Italy.”
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK548561/
So no, the article didn’t make it up. In fact, you made up the claim that they made it up. Seems like you are the one with an axe to grind.
See, e.g.: https://i.ibb.co/Qvbdjqf7/amazon-curcumin.png
My impression as an author with books on Amazon is that you get one review or rating for every 20-30 purchases, and there are two products with "200k people have purchased multiple times."
And that's to say nothing of people who have bought such products via other sources, like Wal-Mart, etc.
All that, and you have "several" cases? That's not a lot. You need much stronger evidence to support any assertion that the nature of the product is harmful. (As opposed to contamination or chance effects.) If anything, I'd say that purchase and utilization statistics support the notion that the product is not harmful.
Although it seems this needs more research, I'd be wary dismissing it out of hand just because people haven't been having an acute reaction.
Edit: in europe
When I checked the turmeric supplement I use. Which I buy in a reputable health food, and supplement chain in Norway. It is 40mg of turmeric, which according to the article is well under the acceptable daily dose. As far as I understand Norway follows the EU directives on this, but has some additional strictures as well. I wouldn't expect the difference to be this stark though.
Btw. the reason I use turmeric supplements is that I have a tendency to get persistent inflammation, and for me, the supplements seems to help with that. But if I didn't have this problem, I would not take it, and also, it isn't given that it works for you, even if it does for me.
https://peixeverde.pt/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/curcumega-8...
Pretty sure that is a mg, not an μg
I heard it is good, not trusting generic "healthy wonder medicines" in general.
one, it's extremely likely that the article is incomplete and lack critical info like a presence of lead, or genetic predisposition.
Two: 10g is crazy. That's how you get kidney stones. Put so curcuma and black pepper in your meals. In EU, supplements (and recently, tea) are tested for heavy metal and plastic, and to see if the ingredient list is correct, but their effectiveness is not.
That's a teaspoon. The average South-east asian eats close to that much in a day for their entire lives.
The description states:
Each serving of Qunol Turmeric capsules' formulation contains 2250mg of curcumin with 95% curcuminoids. Other turmeric formulations may only contain 5% curcuminoids.
The less manageable risk is the liver issue. The HLA-B*35:01 gene significantly increases the probability of it happening, and this gene can be screened for in theory. Periodic liver testing might be another way to manage the risk, to catch it before it's symptomatic.
It's perfectly legal to dye food yellow with turmeric.
Many synthetic dyes are illegal for food, dyes which (unlike turmeric) have never been shown to have caused actual harm. But which (like turmeric) are known to be toxic at some dose not used in any food product, some 10x or 100x or whatever high multiple.
Curcumin is known to be pharmacologically active; has lots of (poorly understood) biochemical effects, hits lots of targets. It's never been demonstrated to be medically useful. The unjustified assumption—the magical thinking—is that, being a natural plant substance, maybe some of these random effects, randomly twiddling with the biochemistry of a human body without understanding what you're doing, might be beneficial—so people deliberately ingest it. That's accepted. It's the opposite with synthetic chemicals: if one's biochemically active in some poorly-understood way, you assume that mystery activity is toxic—not beneficial.
(Tangentially, you should probably avoid turmeric regardless of any of this, because the modern supply chain is contaminated with heavy metals, which cause poisonings[0]).
[0] https://www.consumerreports.org/health/food-safety/your-herb... ("Your Herbs and Spices Might Contain Arsenic, Cadmium, and Lead")
I think it's extremely likely that the majority of people in India and surrounding countries - so, hundreds of millions of people - far exceeds the WHO recommendation every day, and frequently eat as much as this woman did, in foods that also contain black pepper. I googled to make sure, and the top five or so links all said that Indians eat an average of 2-2.5g of turmeric per day.
So perhaps the issue was something else? For example:
- contamination
- taking it on an empty stomach rather than with food
- genetics
- liver damage from something else entirely
(To be fair, the Ars Technica article fails the reader by failing to use precise language, inviting dangerous misunderstandings).
They clearly call it turmeric supplements, not curcumin, throughout the article. The main source given is this NBC article, which also clearly calls it turmeric supplements, not curcumin:
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/liver-damage-turm...
So why do you think it's actually curcumin?
https://apps.who.int/food-additives-contaminants-jecfa-datab... ("...ADI of 0–3 mg/kg of body weight for curcumin...")
That's concordant with the "up to 3 mg per kilogram of weight" in Ars, which is phrased ambiguously, as if to refer to turmeric. The Ars editors are in the wrong.
Well, turmeric certainly has a history of “contamination”[1].
[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/goats-and-soda/2024/09/23/nx-s1...
I personally will stick with supplements made by the same laboratories that make prescription drugs and get tested for heavy metals which are most of the popular supplements found on Amazon. The tests are labelled on the bottles.
burnt-resistor•5h ago
jmcgough•5h ago
burnt-resistor•5h ago
Btw, he has a second channel on YT: @HemeReview