Flashback Friday: Turmeric Curcumin Reprogramming Cancer Cell Death

Below is an approximation of this video’s audio content. To see any graphs, charts, graphics, images, and quotes to which Dr. Greger may be referring, watch the above video.

The anticancer effects of the turmeric pigment curcumin extend well beyond its ability to block carcinogens. The anticancer effects of curcumin mainly result from the multitude of ways it regulates “programmed cell death.”

It’s estimated that the human body consists of ten or so trillion cells. That’s a million million. “Almost all of these cells get turned over within approximately 100 days.” We’re like a new person, every three months. We reinvent ourselves physically. And, since we’re just made up of three things—air, water, and food—those are the only inputs—we are what we eat, literally, physically.

In a sense, our body has to rebuild itself every three months with the building materials we deliver to it through our stomach. Our mouths are like the access road to the continual construction site to our body. Trucks roll in three times a day.

What do we want them to deliver? Some shoddy cheap stuff we scrounged around for, or bought at the discount outlets, that’s just going to fall apart? Or, do we want to build our foundation solid? We are each walking around inside the greatest known architectural structures in the universe. Let’s not ruin such grand blueprints by consuming junk.

Anyway, we only own the biological real estate we’re born with. So, if we need to rebuild every three months, we also need a wrecking crew, right? If we’re replacing ten trillion every hundred days, that means we have to kill off like a hundred billion cells every day, normally. Out with the old; in with the new.

We do that primarily through a process called apoptosis—pre-programmed cell death, from the Greek ptosis, meaning falling, and apo, meaning away from. So, it’s our cells falling away from our body. For example, we all used to have webbed fingers and toes. Literally. Each one of us in the womb, until about four months. Then, apoptosis kicks in, and the cells in the webbing in between kill themselves off to separate our fingers.

Some cells in our body overstay their welcome, though—like cancer cells. They don’t die when they’re supposed to, by somehow turning off their suicide genes. What can we do about it? Well, one of the ways curry kills cancer cells is by reprogramming the self-destruct mechanism back into cancer cells. Let me just run through one of these pathways, just so you can see the complexity.

FAS is a so-called death receptor, which activates the FAS-associated death domain, along with death receptor five, and death receptor four. FADD then activates caspase-8, which ignites the death machine, and kills the cell. Where does curry powder fit into all this?

In cancer cells, curcumin, the pigment in the spice turmeric that makes curry powder yellow, upregulates and activates death receptors—as has been demonstrated in human kidney cancer cells, as well as skin cancer, and nose and throat cancer.

It can also activate the death machine directly—as has been shown in lung cancer and colon cancer. Caspases are so-called executioner enzymes, that when activated, destroy the cancer cell from within, by chopping up proteins left and right—kind of “death by a thousand cuts.”

And that’s just one pathway. Here’s all the other ways curcumin can affect apoptosis. And, here’s all the different types of cancer cells curcumin can kill. But, it tends to leave normal cells alone, for reasons that are not fully understood. Overall, this review showed that “curcumin can kill a wide variety of tumor cell types through diverse mechanisms.”

And, it’s because curcumin can affect numerous mechanisms of cell death at the same time, it’s “possible that cancer cells may not [easily] develop resistance to curcumin-induced cell death,” like they do to most chemotherapy. “Furthermore, its ability to kill tumor cells and not normal cells makes curcumin an attractive candidate”—for, supper? Can’t make money on some spice you can buy anywhere: “an attractive candidate for drug development.”

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Images thanks to Lucidialohman and Donovan & Meggin Eastman via flickr, and Susan Arnold via Wikimedia. Original animation thanks to the wizardry of Amélie Bernier-Jean, M.D. and her husband, Shane Barrett.