Try Curcumin for IBD

Just wanted to share my experience here.

I've been taking Curcumin for the past year or so, for general health purposes. There are two studies I've seen showing curcumin having benefits for IBD patients so I figured that was just icing on the cake for me.

Well a lot of people say it helps their joints/muscle aches (I'm a bodybuilder so this comes up a lot) and I wanted to test this out. I stopped taking it for 9 days and while I didn't notice much of an effect at all on my joints/muscles, I did notice my Crohn's symptoms were getting noticeably worse...loose stools, more full/upset stomach, etc. I went back on the curcumin and within 3-4 days things were improving.

A few weeks later I had to come off all supplements for a test I was having done and again around the 6-7 day mark I started noticing a worsening of my symptoms. I started back up again and thankfully 4-5 days later things are improving again.

I'm surprised it made that much of a difference, but it's nice to have something that literally seems to make the difference between going into a flare or not (in one of the studies I recall something like only ~15% of patients went into a flare on curcumin vs ~50% of control patients).

Hopefully you guys can use this to your benefit. I take 1000-1500mg per day. TAKE THE VERSION WITH BIOPERINE OR PREFERABLY THE BCM-95 VERSION. Curcumin on it's own is very poorly absorbed and you'll most likely be throwing your money away unless taking very high doses (8000+mg).

Feel free to throw any questions my way :)

JaSanne said...
Am I misreading your post - you say you take 1000-1500mg per day, then go on to say a person has to take very high doses of 8000mg plus? Can you clarify?

I take 1000-1500mg per day because I used to take the bioperine version and now take the BCM-95 version. These are both much more highly absorbed.

The 8000+mg would be necessary if you took standard Curcumin alone, which I would not recommend.

JAB said...
I've been taking inflamma-less by Irwin which contains a number if things turmeric and bioperine and it's really helped inflammation in other parts of the body so I totally recommend it for that now whether it's helping my gut it's hard to tell since I also take budesonide for the crohns. I wouldn't be surprised if the curcumin is helping you to some extent. Good luck.

I'm glad to hear it's helped, though I'm surprised. I looked it up and the amounts of each individual ingredient seems severely underdosed, about 1/10th to 1/4th of a typical effect dose.

http://ibdnewstoday.com/2015/09/29/curcumin-loaded-microparticles-show-promise-effective-oral-treatment-ulcerative-colitis/