A Weekly Curry Is Good For You
Updated : Jun 4, 2009
VeryHappyPig has brought the people of Ireland some brilliant news over the last five months but VHP thinks it has found its greatest ever good news story.
According to US research eating a curry once or twice a week could help prevent the onset of Alzheimer's disease and dementia.
Mrs VHP had your favourite good news bearing pig on a strict no curry diet of late but now we not only have an excuse to indulge in our favourite cuisine but we have the technical jargon to argue for the case of curry consumption.
By all accounts the key ingredient is curcumin, a component of the spice turmeric.
Curcumin appears to prevent the spread of amyloid protein plaques - thought to cause dementia - in the brain.
Professor Murali Doraiswamy, of Duke University in North Carolina, said there was evidence that people who eat a curry meal two or three times a week have a lower risk of dementia.
He said researchers were testing the impact of higher doses - the equivalent of going on a curry spree for a week - to see if they could maximise the effect.
Professor Doraiswamy told the meeting: "There is very solid evidence that curcumin binds to plaques, and basic research on animals engineered to produce human amyloid plaques has shown benefits."
"You can modify a mouse so that at about 12 months its brain is riddled with plaques.
"If you feed this rat a curcumin-rich diet it dissolves these plaques. The same diet prevented younger mice from forming new plaques.
"The next step is to test curcumin on human amyloid plaque formation using newer brain scans and there are plans for that."
Professor Doraiswamy said a clinical trial was now underway at the University of California, Los Angeles, to test curcumin's effects in Alzheimer's patients.
He said research had also examined turmeric's therapeutic potential for treating conditions such as cancer and arthritis.
VeryHappyPig would like to stress this is not a press release on behalf of the curry shop association of Ireland. VHP also reckons that a curry after a load of pints may not count!
