Turmeric is a PAIN. You might want to double check the methodology of those studies:
I don’t mind the taste of ACV, but I think I’ve just gotten used to it. I typically add it to my hot tea in the morning, and to my ice tea at dinner. I sometimes add lemon juice which helps hide the taste but adds even more tartness.
I’ve been taking Ginkgo Biloba for my memory for years, but I don’t think it’s really doing anything. My mother and grandfather died from Alzheimer’s Disease, and I am double APOE4 allele, so I am also concerned about my memory. I had baseline cognitive testing done a few years ago and was told my memory was normal for my age. I’ve applied for an 18-month AD study that requires either extreme exercise three days a week, or daily moderate exercise. I should find out if they’ve selected me soon.
Have you noticed any memory improvement with either Lion’s Mane or Turmeric since you started taking them?
I forget what my baseline was … 
Seriously my memory has not been a problem to my awareness, no more than the same absent mindedness I had as a young adult. It’s more my goal to do whatever I can to prevent later disability, both physical and cognitive. Or at least limit the period of time to as small as I can. We had the lion’s mane in the house as part of a proposed protocol for an illness my wife has been dealing with but did not proceed with. Looking it up there was some reason to believe it might have long term benefits maybe and so I started using it since it was here. I’m not sure if I’ll order up another bottle or not. Animal model increased hippocampal neurogenesis, which suggests the possibility that maybe early use would help prevent declines … that however would be a hard study to do and no direct evidence that it does. I do not believe that it provides any short term benefits. But it was here and no harm.
And @Sage_Rat’s article is not far off the mark to my read. The hype of turmeric (more the cucurmin) as having any proven benefit is overblown. Still some meta analyses and small studies are very suggestive. For example:
And
But even that shows benefit in those markers more on those already with pathological inflammation … unclear if that translates to any potential benefit for someone without any current condition and following decent dietary and exercise practices. I even have some small concern that some inflammation is needed for gaining benefits of exercise - could it interfere? Maybe?
It was an impulse purchase at Costco and probably I’ll use it up and not buy again.
But I empathize with the thought: once already doing the proven benefit items of nutrition, exercise, and when indicated medications, very low risk items that may have benefit get thought about too.
Personally, I’d recommend boswellic acid for inflammation.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ijc.26251
You can rub it on a rash and see reduction of the inflammation (or rub it on half of a rash and see half of a rash) so I can say, definitively, that it has anti-inflammatory power. It seems to reduce the risk of prostate cancer, which is one of the most common in men. While I only linked one study, above, there’s a lot out there. It seems to be pretty well studied and attested.
As for anti-inflammation and muscle building, I wouldn’t say that I’ve researched it deeply but (to get the conversation started), my current understanding would be that:
- Inflammation is part of the healing process and so, unnecessarily reducing it is going to reduce the rate at which you heal and thereby the rate at which you can get back into the gym at full strength.
- As we get older, our body is more likely to become inflamed as a general, everyday reality.
- In a “cows in a spherical vacuum” sense, that regular inflammation among the elderly could be a natural adaptation e.g. helping to prolong our life by fighting the damage done by aging. But, likewise, in a theoretical world it could simply be one of the negative outcomes of aging and, like gray hair, has no “good” attribute or could even be a bad outcome of aging like bad vision and memory.
- Studies on anti-inflammatories that are given to over-the-hill animals seem to fairly consistently show that the regular inflammation that we experience in old age is bad for us. Reducing inflammation increases our healthspan and reduces the chances of cancer. There is no good thing about having extra, continuously heightened, age-correlated inflammation.
- Giving anti-inflammatories to younger animals doesn’t seem to help them in any way and may even be a negative.
In general, my feeling would be that there’s a “right amount” of inflammation that’s best for our health and also a “right amount” that’s best for muscle building. I’d personally guess that those are the same and that if we do something that extends our health, it probably also means that we’re going to be doing better at building muscle. If you’re young, reducing inflammation hinders both. If you’re older (e.g. 40+), anti-inflammatories will probably help with both.
More importantly, cancer is worse than muscles are good.
And at that level I’ll opine as well!
My take is that the mindset of “inflammation bad” is simplistically silly. Inflammation is a complex process of multiple sorts. There is clearly pathological inflammation that we want to reduce, and there also clearly is functional necessary inflammation that we need. Many medicinal approaches are heavy hammers that potentially poorly discriminate between the sorts. To me it is less that age causes more but that it results in less well tuned responses. But that is not a researched POV.
Hence the bottom line that there is no substitute for good nutrition which I believe includes large amounts of fiber solid and plant forward foods and for me a fair amount of fermented food (eg kefir, Kim chi), and exercise, heavy on the aerobic and modest regular strength training. Those actions essentially slow the aging clock.
To be sure, for anyone reading, it should be clear that there are levels of importance and focusing on the minutiae should only come into the question if you’ve already got a handle on the big things. For example, we’ll say that aronia berries are a anti-oxidant rich superfood. If that’s all you’re eating, you’re going to suffer from malnutrition, muscle wasting, etc. and live a short and unhealthy life. You need a well-balanced diet. Once you’ve got that, maybe there’s a place in it for aronia berries and those displace the similar but slightly worse blueberries, but you’re really splitting hairs at this point.
If you want to be healthy and live a long time:
- Eat a healthy diet:
- Healthy Eating Plate | The Nutrition Source | Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
- Phytonutrients: Paint your plate with the colors of the rainbow - Harvard Health
- Your heart health is going to be best if you get exercise at different tempos. E.g. a small amount of sprinting, a medium amount of jogging, and a fair amount of walking would be a good standard (but likewise swimming, weight lifting, or other activities that you can do at different levels of heart activity).
- The sun is a carcinogen (especially, the more pale you are), wear sunblock.
- Don’t smoke or do drugs.
Good list. I would also add Reduce Stress, whatever it takes to do that for someone. I believe chronic stress leads to poor health. My favorite stress reducer is a daily walk in the woods with my dog.
I’d probably go with:
Make sure to get enough sleep, and for that sleep to be at an appropriate time. Have reasonable work hours. Adjust your news sources to only induce in yourself a reasonable amount of frustration at the world (you might be a person who needs to read only and regularly about the fluffiness of puppies and not much else, we can’t tell you).
Yes, good sleep is as important as any of the others IMO.
Which overlaps with the strength training thread. For many of these things the biggest benefits are frontloaded. Any exercise at all is huge benefit. More better but marginally less. Any weight training huge. More than hour per week less maybe even reversing some health benefit.
To the extreme like this stuff where the marginal benefit may or may not exist.
Although I agree with the recently posted list, in general the simplification of very complex metabolism is troublesome. Vague language like “supporting the immune system” or “reducing inflammation” tends to invite nonsense, ignore a lot of relevant complexity, and diminish just how good the body is at compensating for too much of one thing.
Weightlifters, sometimes willing to take stuff that is clearly dangerous, cower at the idea of taking a small dose of ibuprofen if in pain after a workout. Based on what? Influencers saying this is a bad idea. Due to a study of twenty young students who did this for eight weeks and are said to have made marginally less gains. So what? I don’t take it every day or week, nor am I a novice student. You really can’t draw big conclusions from limited studies, especially with different populations.
I take my fair share of stuff with some evidence that may help but might not. I’m content to eat my vinegar in chip or pickle form. Acetic acid has a pKa of 4.6 so it won’t do much to teeth especially when diluted to 5% or yet more. Does it help sugars? Don’t know, likely not much. Look forward to seeing if it has any effect on dolphins. But in general, I prefer food to supplements due to this very biochemical complexity and our rudimentary understanding. So I take turmeric as rhizome. Maybe it does something.
But required? Metabolism and inflammatory processes are very complex. You and I know enough to know that we don’t know and those who know more than us have more they know they don’t know! It’s only those who know very little who think they understand.
It has to be presented in a simplified version that communicates adequately. Doing that is difficult. Often done poorly to be sure. But occasionally focus on one aspect of the complex process is enough: the rest will follow.
So sure, the actual processes are more than “glucose flattening” alone. AND the actions that achieve that will bring the other complexities along too. Usually.
It is funny what motivates. Health schmealth. Gains bro! There is also of course the tradition of “vitamin I”, popping ibuprofen prophylactically before every exercise session, or using it to allow working out heavy through mild injuries instead of allowing recovery … often with bad results. Endurance athletes maybe even worse.
While the cautions about gains interference may be based on weak evidence my WAG is that it’s better to listen to what pain is telling you. Philosophically I am hesitant to use a drug with fairly powerful broad multi system impacts without very good cause. Unknown unknowns and all. Even turmeric … I wouldn’t take doses that are thought effective for osteoarthritis. That’s chronic medication. Better an amount that may do nothing!
I’m running out of the bottle of lion’s mane and probably won’t bother ordering more. Probably I’ll not buy more turmeric when the bottle runs out. It’s pretty silly of me to spend energy even thinking about possible marginal items. I know better. But sometimes it’s hard not to.
And you also exercise to accomplish the metabolic and inflammatory positive impacts as well. Which is the most effective approach for physiologic and mental health benefits inclusive of metabolic and inflammatory despite the search for shortcuts or marginal improvements.
So yeah you’re right.
Of course you don’t really understand a complex idea until you can state it in fairly simple terms to someone without this knowledge. A lot of good medical practice is essentially making explanations understandable but still accurate. Einstein said to make things as simple as one can but not simpler. But this depends on your audience.
A lot of books are written about health, wellness, wellbeing, nutrition, longevity. Sometimes by doctors or others with much clinical experience. There are also books where the author states “they got into medical school” or could have, decided not to go, did something without much real experience but consider themselves experts because they say they could have spent four years learning in great detail about stuff - but just didn’t. These people are forced to resort to simplifications because their understanding is superficial or they parrot what someone else says. This may be true of doctors and other professionals too. But this is not at all equivalent, as you point out. Which is why it is often done poorly. Of course, understanding things and communicating this well are different skills.
Feedback is important and pain too. Any weightlifter and many others eventually learn to differentiate between injury, pain that should not be worked through, discomfort that needs more recovery and soreness that may suggest a new exercise, overdoing things or an expected part of increased load or volume, or technical equivalent, and so in some cases may be safely ignored.
For variable values of “eventually” …
FWIW I know of many who have years of experience (in both the strength and the endurance camps) who still fail to listen well enough, with injury or overtraining resultant. For my own mileage the soreness of a novel exercise or other alteration of the routine (different than full out DOMS) is more a welcome mild soreness, not bad enough to need ibuprofen. And ibuprofen isn’t very effective for DOMS.
But we stray from glucose flattening. My sense is that it is a formulation that fits the simple enough but not simpler benchmark. “Decreasing inflammation” may be a bit simpler than it can be though. Not sure.
We know what is meant by glucose flattening. Someone is doing an interesting experiment on themselves. Things have been proposed that may work and people understand what that would look like. How important it is is a more difficult question, but it likely makes some difference, maybe substantially so.
This is, of course, different than claiming Covid inflammation may be helped by the miraculous cleaning power of bleach, or the immune-strengthening properties of worm medication.
Although I don’t usually take ibuprofen for soreness, the fear of doing so seems strange with a population sometimes willing to do so much else.
Really?
It seems very internally consistent to me.
For that population, health outcomes, short or long term, are not of importance, and are easily sacrificed in service of the goals they care about, be they hypertrophy, strength, or specific sport’s performance. But any even small possibility of doing something that gets in the way of maximizing achievement on those goals? Uh uh.
And again back to glucose flattening. Agree that some degree of glucose flattening in and of itself likely is important, but also the actions that result in it are likely also of benefit in other ways beyond the direct impact of the glucose curve. Those ways are complicated and likely less clear, and not required to understand for most of us, thus the concept meets the simple enough and not too simple standard.
People consistently give too much credence to small studies of different populations. Taking an anti inflammatory when sore is seen as harmful (!), but any other form of fighting inflammation is deemed okay - dubious supplement, ice baths, a thousand theoretical interventions. It is like Covid in the sense that a proprietary solution someone can profit from is sometimes deemed better than what is actually likely to work or does work.
In severely ill ICU patients, it seems logical that keeping tight control of their glucose levels by making frequent measurements and intervening should be better and save lives. But the reality is generally more complicated, and mortality benefits are not obvious. What did you learn about sleep in medical school? The body has reasons for doing what it does which are not always known or appreciated. We know the harm from diabetes and, if everything is a spectrum, prediabetes should also cause concern. But does that mean every spike should be avoided or minimized, ignoring the ones from exercise or during hormetic things like saunas? Maybe. And maybe the full answer will turn out to be less predictable and more nuanced.
Still, hard to argue with reducing sugar if this does not mean avoiding vegetables. Hard to argue with the increasingly known benefits of exercise. Seems wise to sleep better, eat more fibre and stress less. If some foods are better, eat those if able. If eating in a certain order helps, why not?
Exactly what I learned! 
Almost certainly so.
So I’ve done some googling both general and Google scholar …
I hadn’t appreciated the “glucose goddess” hacks trending crap. Oy.
Meanwhile the academic side is of course … interesting.
Short version is that keeping within day glycemic variability within 36% and hgbA1c variation within 5% are considered reasonable targets. Hypoglycemia resulting from swings is considered as big or bigger a risk of short and long term complications as hyper.
Still some questions open about directionality. Is greater lability a marker of worse disease or causing more complications or both?
And glucose variability does NOT seem to be causative of inflammation in healthy non-diabetic not pre diabetic subjects, according to this study:
But in prediabetes hyperglycemia after loading is associated with increased oxidative stress (what often is meant by the term inflammation in these contexts.)
So begins the nuance!