So Which Curcumin Should You Buy?
Just Three Formulations Are Worth Your Money. One Is Clearly the Best.
If you care about brain health, you may know already that taking a daily curcumin supplement is one great strategy to protect your brain.
Since 2005 I’ve been taking curcumin myself, to prevent memory loss, Alzheimer’s, and other neurodegenerative diseases. I’ve explored curcumin’s many benefits extensively online here. Besides being an anti-inflammatory and anticancer agent, curcumin’s unique role is that it helps your brain’s immune system to clear excess amyloid. For decades, research scientists thought amyloid was the primary cause of Alzheimer’s. Many still do. They are probably mistaken, but they are right in that excess amyloid is itself destructive to the brain.
New disease models are telling us it is hypoxia, and the death of neurons, that is the primary cause of Alzheimer’s. See the lovely book, The Age of Scientific Wellness, by Lee Hood and Nathan Price, 2022, for more. That’s why daily sweating exercise (45+ minutes a day), daily saunas (15–20 mins), and even oxygen therapy, have all proven powerfully protective against dementias. This famous 20-year Finnish study of 2300 men ages 40–60 at the start of the study, showed a 65% lower risk of dementias of all types over the next two decades among those those who took a hot (175 degree) 15–20 minute sauna four or more times a week. So make sure you are getting a lot of good oxygen to your brain on a daily basis, friend. Your brain needs that oxygen to keep working. As you age, certain areas of your brain will get progressively less oxygen, putting them at risk of hypoxia and neuronal death. Exercise is the easiest way to raise oxygen levels and save those hypoxic cells.
But excess amyloid, which is expressed when cells try to repair the damage caused when neurons die, also creates a host of new problems. Fortunately, curcumin helps your brain’s immune system to clear that excess, restoring a natural balance.
You may have heard that there are wildly different absorption rates and costs of different formulations. At the one to four pills many of us would be willing to take daily, very few will create high enough blood and brain curcumin levels to actually provide a clinical neuroprotective effect.
In 2014, I found the work of Jan Frank at the U. Hohenheim in Germany (see link above). Frank showed that micellized curcumin, suspended in fats, cross into the blood and brain with incredible efficiency. His group patented a formulation, NovaSOL curcumin, that makes it 277X more bioavailable in women, and 114X more bioavailable in men, than standard curcumin formulations. They licensed it to Solgar, a distinguished maker of supplements. I used to take four of Solgar’s Full Spectrum Curcumin softgels daily, roughly 360 mg of curcumin or curcuminoids.
But based on my lay research below, in 2020 I cut back my curcumin to two softgels daily, one in the morning, and one in the evening, to get two spikes in the blood, more biologically natural than once a day. I also take that curcumin with two other brain supplements: two grams of fish oil (omega-3 fatty acids, key to cell membrane structure and fluidity) and a gram of phosphatidylcholine (the predominant phospholipid in cell membranes), again split between the morning and evening.
In my layman’s interpretation of animal studies with Alzheimer’s mice, we need a blood Curcumin maximum (Cmax_ of at least 300 nmol/L to get enough curcumin into our brains for it to start reversing amyloid plaque buildup. We all get more plaques as we age, and when we get too many, especially in our hippocampus, which links our working memory to our long-term memories, we get Alzheimer’s.
Frank’s work shows that a dose of two Solgar curcumin softgels in humans will give us a 5X higher Cmax (around 1500 nmol/L) than that proposed 300 nmol/L “threshold.” Just one softgel still gets us well over that threshold. There’s also evidence that taking your curcumin with olive oil, fish oil, or MCT oil capsules will further boost Cmax.
Unfortunately, Solgar curcumin is expensive! It’s 50 cents a softgel, or $2 a day. My family all takes it, and many of my friends, but I have been hoping a cheaper alternative would emerge, so more of the global public might start adopting this vital brain health habit. I knew a second micellized alternative, LongVida curcumin, developed at UCLA, also showed greatly increased blood levels over ordinary curcumin. But according to Frank, 2,000 mg (four 500 mg capsules) of LongVida only gives a Cmax of 88 nmol/L. That is well below the 300 nmol/L threshold that I suspect will most effectively tag your brain’s plaques and aid your microglia (brain immune cells) in removing them. To get to 300 nmol/L, you’d have to take something close to 7,000 mg (14 capsules) a day. That’s just impractical, and more than has been long-term safety tested in humans.
Fortunately, in 2018, Rohitash Jamwal at the U. Rhode Island did a consumer-friendly efficacy study comparing all the new formulations. Sadly it is trapped behind an Elsevier paywall, but I invite you to use Sci-Hub to get it if you like. An errata in the paper made them open access publish a corrected graph from the paper, so I can share that graph here:
Essentially, Jamwal found that only three formulations are highly effective, the NovaSOL/Solgar curcumin, LongVida/ProHealth curcumin, and a third formulation that’s been around since 2013, called CurcuWin (many companies offer CurcuWin curcumin on Amazon). Curiously, the supplement companies licensing all three of these sources all price their curcumin supplements at around 50 cents a pill. Fancy that. All this new competition, and no one is lowering prices yet. That sucks, frankly.
Jamwal reports Relative Bioavailabilities (RBs) of each of 185X, 100X, and 136X , respectively, over unformulated curcumin. But when you look into the doses he used of each, and their Cmax, and AUCs (the time and extent of high blood levels), NovaSOL still looks much more effective than the other two. In my interpretation of his and Frank’s data, two capsules of NovaSOL/Solgar curcumin deliver a roughly 5X higher Cmax than two 500mg capsules of either LongVida/ProHealth or CurcuWin curcumin, and a significantly (but hard to estimate) higher AUC.
So NovaSOL/Solgar curcumin remains clearly the best, in my view. The other two are no cheaper, and will be less effective in my current estimation, so I for one would not take them. The other formulations tested, in my view, are just wasting money. The time to max concentration in the blood (Tmax) for all three of these is similar, at just 1–2 hours, so they won’t be in the blood for more than a few hours. As I’ve said, I suggest splitting your daily dose into one capsule in the morning and one with dinner, and taking each set with a gram of olive/fish/MCT oil and 500mg phosphatidylcholine or phosphatidylserine, to maximize gut absorption, gut health, and liver, heart, and brain benefits.
Near the end of his great paper, Jamwal reminds us that researchers need more funding to test all of these new formulations better, in large clinical studies. Amen buddy! I hope that happens, but I know well the research dystopia and state of advanced plutocracy we live in today. The sad state of America’s scientific research capacities are not likely to change soon.
At the same time, I thank the universe that we also live in a world with accelerating technical productivity and machine intelligence. The plutocrats and their captured politicians can’t stop accelerating change, because it appears baked into the nature of physics and societies. Even our recent global pandemic has acted as a catalytic catastrophe, further accelerating special types of scientific, technological, economic, environmental, political, and societal (“STEEPS”) change. In short, we’re all stuck together on an exponential ride, and we have to learn to steer it the best we can, and anticipate and mitigate its risks and downsides.
Fortunately, as the majority of us start to use Personal AIs later this decade, I expect and predict that we will see a resurgence and renewal of people-first ethics, evidence-based learning and our social democracy, and a swing back to a more empowering American society. America had one such democratic resurgence from the 1890s (the Age of the Robber Barons) to the 1960s (Social Security, the Civil Rights Act, Women’s Liberation, the Counterculture). We’re overdue for another. In the meantime, take your curcumin and do your part to build a People-First World. Life is amazing!
John Smart is a global futurist and foresight educator. His new book, Introduction to Foresight, is free online at ForesightGuide.com and in print on Amazon. It introduces the vital field of professional foresight, and offers forecasts, trends and stories of our 21st century future.
