In today’s article, we want to discuss an Asian cooking spice that’s been gaining a ton of attention lately.
Recently, we’ve seen TURMERIC advertised in bold letters on the labels of tons of things at the store. Anything from salad dressings, to cold-pressed juices, lattes, snacks like crackers or chips, and even in ointments and cosmetics!
Vince put together a short video above going into detail about this!
So what’s the reason?
Companies are trying to figure out ways to add this ancient spice to their products because there are very few foods that have left researchers more intrigued.
Scientists have been studying Turmeric for decades, with thousands of clinical trials already complete.
The conclusions have left researchers in such “awe” that they have deemed Turmeric super spice with an extensive list of potential health benefits – including several ways it may positively impact your weight.
But if you are buying products like teas and crackers hoping to achieve turmeric’s potent benefits .. you may be wasting your money!
It’s not because Turmeric is overly hyped. Turmeric is, no doubt, a superfood.
There is mounting evidence that an active compound in this common spice (called curcumin) could potentially be able to do a host of things ..
- Boost mood and brain-power
- Support joint health
- Better recovery from training
- Delay signs of aging
- Rid the body of free radicals
- Help with certain digestive issues
- Fight excess inflammation
And the most recent discovery is that it even holds great potential in helping people lose weight!
We are going to tell you more about how researchers have found it could help with your weight-loss goals here in just a second.
But before you hop on the turmeric trend …
You need to understand that this spice is a little complicated.
You see, even if you doused every meal with turmeric, it probably wouldn’t be enough to tap into any of its potential benefits.
Also, as great as turmeric is, your body doesn’t absorb it very well.
If you aren’t absorbing it, then it can’t do all these great things researchers claim it may be able to do.
We are going to go over the best way to go about adding turmeric to your diet so that it is absorbed and is effective.
We are also going to give you 3 reasons that scientists believe consistent use of this ancient herb (as part of a healthy diet and exercise program) – could help you achieve better body composition without having to do any additional dieting or exercise.
WHAT IS TURMERIC
Before we get into those details, allow us to provide you a quick run-down of what this spice is and why scientists have become so interested in studying it.
Turmeric is the bright yellow spice that you see in tons of Asian cuisines. It is native to southwest Asia and a “cousin” to ginger.
It’s been used in India for over 4-thousand years not only to flavor food .. but by ancient medicine men who were apparently on to something!
These western medicine doctors have long believed that turmeric has a host of medicinal properties, from helping people with stomach issues and a sluggish metabolism, to too much inflammation.
These are all things that could not only be bad for your overall health .. but could also impact your waistline.
The spice’s potential to be a powerful antioxidant and anti-inflammatory agent isn’t really in the turmeric itself.
It’s powers are found in an active ingredient within turmeric, called curcumin.
A little further down in this article, we will tell you the exact way to ensure you are getting enough of this active compound.
First, let’s discuss turmeric’s potential benefits.
BENEFIT #1: Decreased Inflammation and “DOMS”
The first way that curcumin – the active ingredient in Turmeric – may help you reach your weight-loss goals is a discovery that scientists have made over and over.
It is by far the aspect that gets the most attention.
Curcumin could help reduce inflammation in the body. This includes inflammation found in fat cells, which scientists have discovered could be the root cause of your weight issues or your inability to lose weight … no matter how hard you diet and exercise.
Not only does being overweight in and of itself cause excess inflammation, but it is much easier for the body to focus on losing fat and building muscle when it doesn’t have to constantly fight excess inflammation.
Here is a good example …
Have you ever killed a gym session but then been way too sore to hit the gym again, even days later?
This type of pain is called .. Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness (DOMS), and it’s there because of muscle damage and inflammation.
Some inflammation isn’t a bad thing. When you are training hard, your muscles need some damage (or inflammation) to grow. It’s when that inflammation lingers or is throughout your body in excess, that it can create trouble.
Researchers have found curcumin could help calm down excess inflammation, which could significantly decrease muscle soreness and get you back in the gym .. quicker!
In one double-blind study, researchers gave some test subjects either a placebo, or a curcumin supplement. They found that those that took the curcumin supplement had moderate to large reductions in pain 24 to 48 hours after lifting, as well as faster muscle recovery, compared to those that did not.
This is exactly what you want .. you never want to be too sore to not be able to train again, or not give that next session your all!
While some muscle damage is necessary to grow muscle, you do want to recover from that damage as fast as possible.
The inflammation benefits (and how they may impact your weight) – don’t stop there.
Remember that we mentioned earlier that curcumin may also have brain and mood boosting capabilities? These are both things that could impact your motivation to train and stick to your diet.
In one randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial, researchers gave test subjects with a background of mood swings, either curcumin or placebo capsules, twice a day for 8 weeks.
In the first four weeks, they didn’t find much of a difference between groups. But from week four until week eight, the curcumin group had significantly more significant mood improvements, compared to the placebo group.
Researchers concluded that the reason probably has to do with inflammation. People with mood swings often have more inflammation, and oxidative stress, which they say can impact all your major organs, including the brain!
Crazy, right?
They also believe that inflammation may be associated with lower levels of serotonin and dopamine, which are your mood, or “happy” hormones!
So by lowering oxidative stress and inflammation, with an anti-inflammatory compound like curcumin, your brain transmitters are more protected, which researchers believe may lead to possible improvements in mood!
It may not seem like these things could help you shed fat, but they both impact how motivated you are to hit the gym and stick to your diet. Since consistency is KEY to seeing results, those things are pretty important!
Once you get inflammation under control, you very well may see tons of “health mysteries” (as well as excess fat) start to suddenly diminish! All because you finally have all that excess inflammation in your body in check.
Before we move on to the next way Turmeric can help you reach your weight loss goals, we do want to point out one thing you may have missed in that study we just mentioned.
Weeks 1- 4, the test subjects didn’t notice any changes. It wasn’t until after CONSISTENT use that they experienced the potential benefits of curcumin.
We will go over consistency a little more here in a second because it’s really important when supplementing with this spice.
BENEFIT #2: Healthy Blood Sugar Levels & Improved Insulin Response
Another way researchers have found turmeric could help aid in weight loss is that it may be able to assist in maintaining healthy blood sugar levels and help support a healthy insulin response.
Both of these things are important because they play a significant role in how much fat your body stores.
If you have a suboptimal insulin response, which is essentially the way your body uses carbohydrates, protein, and fats — you could end up storing these nutrients in all your trouble spots instead of using them for energy.
Studies suggest that curcumin may play a role in improving blood sugar metabolism, which could reduce this from happening.
One study followed 240 adults and found that taking a curcumin supplement over 9 months supported healthy beta cells. These are cells that make insulin, the hormone that controls the level of sugar in your blood. As we just touched on .. you want steady levels of blood sugar.
In another 6-month randomized, double-blind placebo-controlled clinical trial, the same type of patients were studied. They were given either a placebo or a curcumin supplement. Researchers found those that used curcumin improved their overall metabolic profiles — so they lost more fat (belly fat in particular.)
Before we tell you the right way to take this superfood, we’ve got one more way curcumin could help enhance your fat-loss efforts.
This last discovery may be the most significant reason a supplement full of curcumin should be something you take every single day.
BENEFIT #3: Increase GOOD Fat Cells
Curcumin has shown promise in its ability to help increase the number of GOOD fat cells your body has.
Yes, there is such a thing as GOOD FAT cells. They are called BROWN fat, or BAT. Scientists have discovered that brown fat cells don’t store fat. They actually do the opposite.
Brown fat cells are like an internal thermostat and create fat-burning heat in your body .. so they actually BURN fat.
Now, your body also has white fat cells. These are the cells where all those extra calories go and hang on, hoping you will use them for energy later.
You WANT brown fat and you DON’T want white fat.
So, what does this have to do with turmeric?
There is science that demonstrates the active ingredient in turmeric (curcumin) has the potential to turn those unhealthy white fat cells into fat-burning, thermogenic, brown fat cells!
A study published in Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communications found that curcumin promoted the browning of white fat. This led test subjects to a decrease in body weight and fat mass, without changing anything about food intake.
Harvard researchers discovered that this happens because of the beneficial chemicals that are produced in curcumin .. called phytochemicals.
They believe these phytochemicals can assist your body in releasing a fat-burning hormone called Irisin, which is the same hormone that we produce when we exercise.
This means there is a way we can possibly release this fat-burning hormone (irisin) – without exercising! And that is by consistently supplementing with curcumin.
We definitely see a lot of promise in curcumins’ role in not only helping us create more healthy brown fat but keeping that nasty fat-storing white fat from forming, to begin with.
HOW TO EFFECTIVELY CONSUME TURMERIC
Before you reach into your spice cabinet or stock up on turmeric tea, there is something important you need to know.
When you see turmeric powder in the spice aisle of your grocery store, that is simply a ground-up version of turmeric, which contains curcuminoids.
But here is the deal.
There are 3 main curcuminoids in turmeric. The one we keep telling you about, curcumin, is only one of them.
Curcumin is what you are looking for. That is the active curcuminoid that scientists attribute to helping manage inflammation responses, maintain healthy blood sugar, decrease fat storage, and assist in activating your body’s thermogenic brown fat.
When you sprinkle turmeric spice on your food, experts believe only about 3% of it is actually curcumin. This means you aren’t getting very much.
Also, curcumin by itself metabolizes in the body quickly. When you take it as it is (in pure turmeric form), it doesn’t stay in the body very long. This means it doesn’t have enough time to get to work.
To get enough curcumin into your system to actually be effective, you would need to consume multiple teaspoons of turmeric throughout the day, every single day.
As great as Asian cuisine is, this would get old, fast! There is no way you would keep up with using that much of the spice, every single day!
And again, remember that consistency is crucial when supplementing with this spice.
You can’t just take it hit or miss and expect to notice a difference.
But that isn’t the only issue. The bioavailability (or absorption) of curcumin is extremely low if you take it by itself. This means consuming it alone, even in high amounts, also isn’t going to do you much good,
This can be easily resolved if you combine turmeric with another natural ingredient that increases its bioavailability.
You will want to consume black pepper at the exact same time as turmeric. Specifically, an extract obtained from black pepper fruits – called BioPerine.
This patented form of black pepper has shown to increase the absorption of curcumin by as much as 2000-percent!
So .. if the spice itself isn’t going to cut it .. how in the world do you consume it?!
Up until very recently, you really only had one option if you wanted to reap the benefits of this ancient superfood
You would need to eat numerous tablespoons, at least 4 or 5 times a day, with equal amounts of black pepper .. and then hope you were getting enough and actually absorbing it.
Now .. it’s much easier.
There are bioavailable curcumin supplements on the market that will provide you with pure turmeric that has lots of curcumin, as well as appropriate doses of black pepper, so it can be absorbed.
But you should use caution when selecting a turmeric supplement.
Because this super-food has become so high demand, many of the turmeric supplements you see out there aren’t great quality.
There are a lot of companies that are trying to make money off the spice’s popularity, so they find the lowest quality form out there to keep manufacturing prices down.
Just like sprinkling a little on your food .. this would be a total waste of money.
If you are interested in a formula that contains only the highest-quality turmeric and optimal dosages Bioperine black pepper extract, check out THIS ONE.
Still Not Sold?
Do you .. WANT TO KNOW MORE?!
Hopefully, this article helped you better understand that the hype around turmeric is real.
Researchers have no doubt shown we have every reason to be totally obsessed with this spice.
If you have tried a Turmeric supplement in the past but didn’t see or feel the benefits everyone raves about, you may have been using a low quality version, or one that didn’t contain BioPerine. If you are interested in taking a Turmeric supplement that contains only the highest-quality turmeric and optimal dosages Bioperine black pepper extract, check out Sculpt Nation’s TURMERIC BLACK.
SOURCES
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https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25795285/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25046624/
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/medicine-and-dentistry/insulin-response
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22773702/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24445038/
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0006291X15305350
https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/major-fat-burning-discovery
https://now.tufts.edu/news-releases/turmeric-extract-suppresses-fat-tissue-growth https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5137861/ https://directorsblog.nih.gov/2013/03/26/brown-fat-white-fat-good-fat-bad-fat/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27355903/
https://dmsjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13098-019-0437-7
https://www.webmd.com/diet/ss/slideshow-turmeric
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