A nice plate of hot curry can be one of the joys of living with its enticing, enchanting, almost addicting flavor.
If you like it extra spicy, it’s almost like a meditation as you feel it going down. The experience can stay with you for hours.
Or it can hit you after a few hours (see photo)….
But now there’s a NEW twist: curry’s ingredients may help combat skin cancer:
The compound that makes curry yellow could help fight skin cancer, U.S. researchers reported on Monday.
They said curcumin, found in the spice turmeric, interferes with melanoma cells.
Tests in laboratory dishes show that curcumin made melanoma skin cancer cells more likely to self-destruct in a process known as apoptosis.
The same team has found that curcumin helped stop the spread of breast cancer tumor cells to the lungs of mice.
Bharat Aggarwal of the Department of Experimental Therapeutics at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston and colleagues treated three batches of melanoma cells, known as cell lines, with curcumin at different doses and for varying times.
The curcumin suppressed two proteins that tumor cells use to keep themselves immortal, the researchers write in next month’s issue of the journal Cancer.
“Based on our studies, we conclude the curcumin is a potent suppressor of cell viability and inducer of apoptosis in melanoma cell lines,” Aggarwal’s team wrote.
“Future investigation to determine the effects of curcumin in animal models of melanoma and clinical trials are planned.”
The new findings were praised by Costas Koumenis, an associate professor of radiation oncology at Wake Forest University School of Medicine. “I think it’s an interesting and provocative study,” he said. “It shows some new insight into how turmeric is working to inhibit the growth of melanoma cells.”
Koumenis is studying whether curcumin can be used to enhance radiation therapy in deadly brain tumors called gliomas and other tumors in animals.
The Texas researchers also pinpointed exactly how the spice ingredient works to kill tumor cells, he said. “It gives us a better understanding of the mechanism of how it works to inhibit melanoma growth.”
But he cautioned that the study was done in the lab, and the spice must be tested on animals, and eventually people, before it is proven to be effective.
For the past 20 years, Koumenis said, turmeric has been studied, mostly as an agent to prevent cancer. For instance, some researchers have found an association between diets rich in curcumin and reduced rates of colon cancer. But more recently, the focus has shifted to study the spice as a cancer treatment.
U.S. News & World Report has this cautionary note:
But is Indian food really a cure for cancer? While this laboratory evidence is interesting, researchers say, it doesn’t prove that curcumin will help fight cancer in humans. “It’s way in its infancy,” Allan Halpern, chief of dermatology at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, says of the research. “The problem is that, to date, we do not have is clinical data to support the fact that using these agents as a chemo-preventative strategy is effective.”
In the meantime, Aggarwal and his colleagues continue to tests curcumin on a wide variety of cancers, including breast cancer. “Curcumin is a perfect alternative [to chemotherapy], but we have to prove that it works,” he says.
Indeed: just think about it. Perhaps in the future instead of chemo, patients can enjoy a piping hot plate of lamb curry or chicken curry. Then top it off with a Mohan Meakin beer.
MORE READING 4 U:
—MELANOMA: American Cancer Society
—National Cancer Institute
—Patak Indian Foods
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.