When working with patients to facilitate their best health outcomes, your role as a DC often extends beyond what takes place in your office. While chiropractic adjustments, stretches and other hands-on activities make up a large portion of how you help patients, your expertise in overall health and well-being can make a massive difference.
Supplementation is a superb example of this. With supplements like turmeric offering tremendous health benefits, educating your clients on how to best maximize those benefits is impactful. With that in mind, here’s how to enhance the bioavailability of turmeric.
Turmeric is a powerful natural ingredient that can be used as a supplement or a spice. To maximize its benefits, it’s important to enhance its bioavailability, which can be low.
Enhancing the benefits of turmeric by increasing its bioavailability
The benefits of turmeric
As a therapeutic supplement, turmeric offers numerous noteworthy benefits, making it a compelling addition to a daily supplementation regimen. Because it is also quite tasty, turmeric can be used as a spice when cooking, too.
Among the beneficial characteristics of turmeric are its anti-bacterial, anti-inflammatory, anti-fungal and anti-viral properties. It is often used to prevent and treat health problems like arthritis, type-2 diabetes and even certain cancers. Some research shows it may be useful in preventing and treating depression, as well.
In addition to its positive impact on health, turmeric contains a number of beneficial vitamins and minerals. This list includes calcium, iron, magnesium, phosphorus and potassium, as well as trace amounts of B vitamins, copper, C vitamins, manganese, selenium and zinc.
How to enhance the bioavailability of turmeric
Despite its potency as a health supplement, turmeric has low bioavailability. This means the body has trouble absorbing and utilizing turmeric, potentially limiting its positive effects. Studies seem to show this low bioavailability is due to the body’s low absorption rate of turmeric, as well as the quick metabolization of the substance.
Low bioavailability means the benefits of turmeric are severely limited in actuality. The lower the bioavailability, the less impactful the effect.
With the primary concern of turmeric supplementation being its bioavailability, the obvious question is how that bioavailability can be increased. Remember, the higher the bioavailability, the greater the positive effect of turmeric. Thankfully, there are ways to boost the bioavailability of turmeric and increase the realized benefits of using it.
If cooking with turmeric as a spice, it can be combined with certain foods to improve its bioavailability. This is a delicious and effective way to experience the benefits of turmeric. Consider using it when cooking eggs or enjoying yogurt.
While certain foods do increase turmeric’s bioavailability, the results are still minimal. To enhance the bioavailability to a point of noticeable effectiveness, it should be used as a supplement alongside its enhancers. Of these, two substances stand out (piperine and bromelain) as being particularly useful.
Piperine is the primary active ingredient found in black pepper, and research has shown that combining it with turmeric can boost turmeric’s bioavailability by 20 times. This works by forming hydrogen bonds that aid in metabolic transport while simultaneously limiting the metabolization of the substance.
Bromelain, which is found in pineapple plants, can also aid the body in its use of turmeric. Rather than relying on an interaction between bromelain and turmeric, this relationship is more adjacent than direct. Bromelain helps the body absorb other substances, thereby increasing the bioavailability of turmeric when taken together.
Supplementing with turmeric
To best experience the benefits of turmeric, supplementation is recommended. Taking any turmeric supplement will not do, though. Not all supplements are created equal, and being selective with the one you choose can determine its bioavailability and effectiveness.
Keep in mind, it is important to look for supplements with ingredients that enhance the bioavailability of turmeric. A quality turmeric supplement should include piperine or bromelain; preferably both. Additionally, the supplement should contain a concentration of turmeric’s active ingredient of curcumin. Ninety-five percent curcumin is a good baseline.
Turmeric Extract from Dee Cee Laboratories, Inc. is an exemplary turmeric supplement containing not only a high concentration of curcumin (95%) but also black pepper extract and bromelain. Together, these three ingredients dramatically increase the bioavailability of turmeric and enhance its positive effect on the body, including as an antioxidant and anti-inflammatory.
Because Dee Cee Laboratories manufactures all of its supplements in an FDA-registered facility and upholds the most stringent standards of production, its Turmeric Extract is of noticeable quality and as trustworthy as supplements can be.
