Can Eating Curry Prevent Memory Loss and Dementia?
Various preparations from the plant Curcuma longa, also known as turmeric have been used for millenia in South Asia as both as a spice in diverse culinary traditions (including many curries) and to treat an array of different health conditions. Recently, many scholarly articles have been written in the Western medical literature that support a promising role for natural turmeric in the treatment of cancer, memory loss including Alzheimer’s dementia, and other conditions. Most of these studies use animals (such as mice or flies), human cells grown in a dish, or chemical assays to examine the effect of turmeric.
Hints from Humans that Turmeric Protects Memory
One provocative report from the American Journal of Epidemiology in 2006 suggests that increased curry consumption in human populations is associated with a lowered risk for developing cognitive impairment, including memory loss, as one ages. Although this was a retrospective study using a population from Singapore these results are exciting, in part since most curries in Singapore are yellow curries which contain turmeric. Therefore, there is evidence that consuming turmeric prevents memory loss. In fact, people who ate curry “often” (once a month or more) were nearly half as likely to have cognitive impairment than were people who ate curry “rarely” (once every 6 months). Though more research needs to be done, these are encouraging results.
