UK professor backs curcumin

Great, local stuff, and a University Professor to boot. He directs 4 researchers at Leicester, looking at curry and red wine as aids against cancer. To get funding of course he calls them curcumin and resveratrol. I doubt politicians understand such long words, otherwise how would he get taxpayers to fund his evenings out for a wine and curry and call it work?

Is it any surprise that research into curry is based in Leicester, a town with 140 curry houses?

I like his emphasis on fun. He says "Success in treating established cancer by chemotherapy, surgery or radiotherapy remains limited, making chemoprevention by diet an important and promising alternative. To date curcumin, a component of turmeric, has progressed as a potential agent for prevention of colon cancer."

It is of course much easier to get curcumin into contact with a colon cancer than a breast cancer, so I may be over optimistic. This is emphasised by his clinical trials which shows curcumin gets into the faeces but not the blood.

But it re-assures me that we may be on the right track. Jan is irradiated today, this guy cautions one to wait five years! He says:

"Even though many putative chemopreventive agents are dietary constituents, which may have been consumed for hundreds of years, there is uncertainty regarding the potential for toxicity when administered as a purified product or clearly defined mixture. Agents such as curcumin, resveratrol, genistein, indole-3-carbinol (I3C) or the brown rice constituent tricin also possess antiproliferative activity in tumour model systems, so that dose-defining studies can be performed in patients with cancer. Within the next five years, the diet-derived substances, curcumin, resveratrol and perhaps tricin will be thoroughly investigated in this way."

Thats the first I had neard of brown rice as a cancer preventative.