Ajay Goel, PhD, Professor and Director for the Center for Gastrointestinal Research and Cancer Prevention at Baylor Scott & White Health in Dallas, Texas, talks about a spice that contains a powerful medicine that may prevent diseases, including cancer.
Interview conducted by Ivanhoe Broadcast News in August 2016.
Essentially you’re looking at genes and cancer right?
Dr. Goel: I’m looking at genes and cancer and I’m trying to see how genes can be influenced in a positive or negative way, how they either speed up the growth of cancer or prevent it.
Are you making some pretty good progress?
Dr. Goel: We believe we are making good progress. More work needs to be done, but we believe that we’re on the right track.
Essentially what are you learning about the pathways or the mechanism of cancer cells that is giving you a sense of promise?
Dr. Goel: Cancer cells are inherently very smart. They know it is in their best interest to survive for as long as they can. So no matter what intervention we try, they’ll try to find a way to work around it — they are clever enough, they are smart enough. What we’re learning is that cancer cells can grow through many, many, many different pathways. Developing treatments or drugs that only target a single pathway is not going to work. The simple reason is that cancer cells don’t function through just one gene or one pathway. What we recognized is that if you have to treat cancer, if you have to prevent cancer, you have to hit it from multiple different directions and you have to develop treatments or preventive strategies that can hit multiple pathways so that you can slow down the growth of these cancer cells.
What are some of the things that you’ve been looking at specifically?
Dr. Goel: One of the things in terms of prevention that we are looking at is dietary botanicals, dietary super foods, dietary herbals and so forth. Because we know that there’s a longstanding history — there’s more than 10,000 years of history in certain cultures that these dietary botanicals reduce inflammation, which is the root cause of most of the chronic illnesses including cancer. We’re looking at some of these diet-based botanicals, which we know perform more than one function. We know that these products, these compounds, these agents have been used for centuries were ideal to treat diseases.
They weren’t used to treat cancer in the past, were they?
Dr. Goel: In the past we didn’t even know what cancer was, so that was a challenge. A lot of people in the past probably had cancers but we were not officially calling them cancer. We knew that they had some sort of inflammatory disorder and we knew that we were using botanicals to reduce inflammation.
It seems to me that you’re what you’re doing is you’re bringing legitimate science to things that have been around for centuries. There are a lot of western adopters who have said no, no to natural cures. So are these people who have been proponents and champions of natural remedies more right than wrong?
Dr. Goel: I believe yes. Two of the oldest systems of medicine are Chinese traditional system for medicine and Indian Ayurvedic system for medicine. These are the two oldest systems of medicine and we know that they’ve been using some of these natural medicines to cure a variety of diseases. We knew all along that not all but many of these natural remedies do work.
What we were missing at that time was we didn’t see the science behind it. We just knew that somebody took this and felt better. Then the skeptics would say, ‘I don’t believe it. Tell me how does it work?’ That was the missing component there. That’s why all these years we did not give the level of respect and recognition these natural remedies deserved. What we’ve learned in the last decade or two is now we have science to back up the claims that we knew for centuries. So now we have the science, we can show how some of these botanicals, some of these natural remedies function. They are safer, they’re much more inexpensive and they’re a lot more potent than some of the drugs we use for treating cancer.
Today we’re going to talk about one in particular right?
Dr. Goel: That’s true.
Tell me, and it’s called curcumin, right?
Dr. Goel: Yes. The one we’re talking about is curcumin. Curcumin comes from the Indian spice turmeric. Turmeric is a spice people use in India for cooking. Most Indian meals you will see they are yellow in color and the yellow color comes from curcumin, present in turmeric. We can use turmeric for cooking, it is colorful, it looks beautiful, and tastes good as well. But about anywhere between 2 percent to 4 percent of turmeric has an active medicine present in it that is called curcumin. I want to clarify turmeric is spice; curcumin is the natural medicine present in turmeric. Like I said only 2 to 4 percent of turmeric has got curcumin, depending on what part of the world turmeric is grown in, what soil it is grown in, so the curcumin content varies in turmeric. If you’re looking to use turmeric like people in India from very early, they eat three meals a day, every meal is laden with turmeric and there is always some residual amount of turmeric in their blood, in their bodies all the time because all meals, every meal is yellow in color. A lot of people like Indian food but they only eat it once in a while, once a week, once a month. So it is impossible that we can consume enough turmeric in the western diet or we can incorporate enough turmeric because it is a spice — it is not a medicine. If the eventual goal is to develop or to derive the therapeutic benefits of turmeric then we must consume curcumin which is present in very small quantities of turmeric.
What do you know about curcumin and the impact on the development of cancer? For example, are you saying that there’s less cancer in India?
Dr. Goel: Yes. Each year new data are tallied up globally for the overall incidence and deaths from various cancers. Year over year from the last so many years since they’ve been doing this, there is clear evidence that India is one of those countries along with Africa that has the lowest burden of cancer in the entire globe. There is a clear separation from other countries, different parts of the world, people have different levels of cancer incidence. India is one of those nations that has one of the lowest cancer incidence, and here we are talking about only one kind of cancer – colorectal cancer. You name any cancer, breast cancer, lung cancer, cervical cancer – all of those cancers have smaller numbers.
There is clear evidence from last 10, 20, 30 years since we started beginning to tabulate these data that colon cancer incidents are 10 to 15 times lower in India than the US. Lung cancer — about seven to eight times lower in India compared to the US. Breast cancer — five to 10 times lower in India compared to the US. Yes there is much lower cancer incidence in India compared to the US and many of the western countries.
You mentioned lung cancer, the principle cause is smoking I guess, do people smoke in India?
Dr. Goel: Yes, people smoke in India and there are a lot of other things that are wrong in India. There, literacy is a problem, poverty is a problem; people can’t afford good meals. I grew up in India. What is interesting to me is that when I look at people in India and some can’t breathe clean air, they can’t afford a good meal, they are not smart enough compared to many of the people here but still there’s something they’re doing right in their daily business which protects them from getting diseases such as cancer. And the one common thing is we all eat three meals a day. Every single meal they eat is yellow in color and that is because of the turmeric use. I don’t want to imply that the protection from the disease in India is primarily because of turmeric or curcumin, but I’m giving an example that there are a lot of these natural remedies, herbs, which do probably make a strong case that there’s something different in those diets compared to western diets, which possibly prevents them from getting these diseases.
What is it about the curcumin that may have an impact on the cells of the cancer, or the prevention of cancer cells?
Dr. Goel: That’s a very good question. The unique thing about curcumin is that curcumin is probably one of the most potent naturally occurring remedies which is a very strong anti-inflammatory. What does that mean from a scientific perspective? We look at any chronic disease and these chronic diseases don’t manifest overnight. It takes decades and decades and years. We’re recognizing that a lot of the chronic illnesses essentially have a root cause in low levels of chronic inflammation, which we don’t recognize because chronic inflammation is completely asymptomatic. What we’re learning now is that if we can suppress this chronic inflammation, we can prevent or delay the onset of disease. Curcumin, to the best of my knowledge, is probably one of the most potent anti-inflammatories. About 1.3 billion people in that part of the world are consuming curcumin, turmeric every single day without recognizing fully that they are doing a favor to themselves, to their health.
When you talk about inflammation, I can’t help but relate that to stress. When you have a little bit of physical inflammation, does that cause mental stress, does that contribute to this whole process?
Dr. Goel: There are two kinds of inflammation, we call it acute inflammation which is chronic inflammation. Acute inflammation occurs when you fall down — you have a sudden injury of some sort, you feel a localized pain. This is acute inflammation, which is actually easy to fix. You can take curcumin or you can take a lot of drugs over the counter such as ibuprofen, which falls in to the category of nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs or NSAIDs. These drugs work wonderfully for treating acute inflammation, and you only take these drugs for a very short period of time.
But you would take curcumin?
Dr. Goel: I would take curcumin because I know that it works. All you need to do is take a very small amount of turmeric and rub it over your wound and you see that wound heal so much faster. There’s no scar, there’s nothing.
Is curcumin being marketed and sold in India as a medication as well as a spice for food?
Dr. Goel: No. In India people don’t use curcumin as a medicine. They don’t need to because they’re eating enough turmeric on a daily basis. People have not really caught up on the point that they need to take additional supplemental curcumin. Yes it is sold but the emphasis is mostly on eating food that is rich in turmeric rather than curcumin. But I think curcumin has a lot more value in nations and in cultures where turmeric is not part of the peoples’ staple diet. I think in those cultures it is better to take curcumin, which you can find in tablet or capsule form and you can use that, which is much more effective. You could just pop in a pill for curcumin and it’s just going to offer you a lot more benefits than worrying about did I eat enough turmeric on a daily basis.
Click off the potential benefits of curcumin as you envision them today, some of them may be proven, some of them you’re still working on.
Dr. Goel: There are more than 9,000 studies published on curcumin you can find on PubMed, the official search engine for looking at scientific studies through The National Institutes of Health, NIH. The beauty of these 9,000 studies is I’ve yet to find a disease for which curcumin has not been studied. That’s the best part. You’re talking mostly about cancer, but I can tell you that there’s not one disease as rare as it might be for which curcumin has not been studied and the reasons are simple again. Because most diseases have a basis in chronic inflammation, or oxidative stress, and since we know that it works in cancer, let’s try it in arthritis.
What we have shown and many others have shown and again building upon what I told you about curcumin again to the best of my knowledge, this is the only natural remedy for which there’s the most amount of scientific evidence, there is no other herb, no other modern medicine that has that science behind it.
Name the diseases that show some level of promise.
Dr. Goel: Curcumin has been studied for many, many diseases but the most amount of literature, the most amount of scientific evidence is in cancers, virtually every kind of cancer. I work primarily on colon cancer, and we have published a lot of work on pancreatic cancer, breast cancer, lung cancer, prostate cancer. But it has been shown to work in Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, arthritis, chronic colitis, inflammatory bowel disease, Cohn’s disease are some others. There is tons and tons of evidence in all of these diseases that curcumin has shown tremendous therapeutic benefit.
All 9,000 studies and the overall conclusion of these studies is that it’s true, that there is a very direct beneficial benefit from consuming curcumin, either in preventing or treating or which?
Dr. Goel: The overwhelming body of evidence on the use of curcumin in these 9,000 studies is on prevention of disease, yes. The last decade or two, there’s growing interest in pushing the limits that it is truly a preventative or can be used as a treatment as well. Of course, the therapeutic benefits vary from study to study depending on what condition. We cannot determine yet that any compound, any drug will work uniformly across the board for everything. But the overall consensus is curcumin is helpful, but more than helpful curcumin is extremely safe, which we can’t say that for every drug ever. It is extremely safe, it has therapeutic benefit and it is inexpensive. It functions as a very good adjunct with the current care for cancer patients or arthritis or anything. You can continue to be on whatever treatment you are but if you take curcumin along with it, it is going to make that treatment look so much better.
Really?
Dr. Goel: Yes. Absolutely. There are things we still need to work on — oncologists question whether they can give their patients curcumin alone when they are candidates for chemotherapy, which is understandable. We have done studies and others have done studies that leave that patient on chemotherapy and give them curcumin along with the chemotherapy. What we’re seeing in that patients who took curcumin along with their chemo is that they responded so much better than people who took chemo alone. They felt better because it mitigates the toxicity, it makes them feel better. They’re saying, I want to continue on this thing rather than taking chemo alone.
It sounds like you enjoy straddling these two worlds of the highest level of scientific research as well as the highest understanding or your own culture and these traditional remedies.
Dr. Goel: I believe you’re right. It’s a passion for me and I feel privileged in a sense because I can see the science, I can see the antidotal evidence, I can see the limitations, I can see the positive things and I can put it all together. I see the overall scenario. I can see where the challenges of some of these natural medicines occur. I can see where the benefits happen. I can see challenges of modern drugs and I can see the patient’s part of the story.
I’m in a privileged situation because I can see all facets of how healthcare works in this particular space. I truly believe that overall my experience has been from a scientific perspective. From what I’ve learned, I would go this far of saying every single person who has tried these remedies on their own or with whatever else they’re doing, they have come back and shared very positive responses saying, this made a big change in my life and it helped me at some level.
And you’re working on a book, how far are you along on your book?
Dr. Goel: I published the book. It got published a few weeks ago. The book is entitles “Curcumin: Nature’s Answer to Cancer and Other Chronic Diseases”, and is available on Amazon, and other stores.
What is your recommendation, what should we be taking on a daily basis?
Dr. Goel: What I’m suggesting is that we should consider, most everybody should consider taking curcumin as a prophylactic, protective, proactive, health supplement. While we are healthy, we should consider taking some of these things so that we can reduce inflammation. We can prevent a lot of disease. I would suggest that we all should take anywhere between 200 to 500 milligrams of a good curcumin supplement daily.
For those who already have some kind of illness the dosage would vary and I would strongly recommend that they discuss this with their physician, with their oncologist, before taking this. The amount of curcumin could vary. Anywhere between half a gram and 2 grams is extremely safe and potent, so people should consider that.
END OF INTERVIEW
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