Common cooking spice shows promise in combating diabetes and obesity

Cooking spice is a host of so many ingredients and each has separate and distinct and very useful medicinal properties. Here only one ingredient ie turmeric has got its recommendation.

When and where are others?

Cinnamon is good for diabetics:

Cinnamon has jumped from the kitchen to the science lab as scientists study the common spice's potential effects on diabetes.

Cinnamon appears to fight inflammation and help insulin, a hormone that controls blood sugar. That news comes from researchers including Richard Anderson, PhD, CNS, of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Beltsville Human Nutrition Research Center in Beltsville, Md.

Anderson and colleagues presented two papers on cinnamon at the Experimental Biology 2006 meeting, held in San Francisco. In both studies, researchers did lab tests in an effort to find cinnamon's active ingredient that might affect diabetes. They didn't test cinnamon on people or animals in either study.
Cinnamon in the Lab

One of Anderson's studies focused on cinnamon's insulin-like effects. In lab tests, Anderson's team found that cinnamon contains antioxidants called polyphenols that boost levels of three key proteins.

Those proteins are important in insulin signaling, glucose (blood sugar) transport, and inflammatory response, the researchers write. That study was partially funded by PhytoMedical Technologies, a company involved in pharmaceutical research on plant-based products, including cinnamon.

The second study probed cinnamon's chemistry. The researchers found and extracted a natural compound in cinnamon that they think may have insulin-like properties. The compound is a proanthocyanidin, which is a type of polyphenol.
Previous Work

Previously, Anderson tested cinnamon on people with type 2 diabetes. Diabetes patients took varying daily doses of cinnamon for 40 days. The doses were larger than levels typically used in food.

The patients' insulin sensitivity improved during the study. No differences were seen among the three doses of cinnamon.

Twenty days after the patients stopped taking cinnamon, those effects were fading but were still significant, meaning that they didn't seem to be due to chance, according to the study. Those findings were presented at the fourth International Congress Dietary Antioxidants and Trace Elements, held in Monastir, Tunisia, in April 2005.

http://diabetes.webmd.com/news/20060404/cinnamon-may-prove-useful-for-diabetes

Ah, the more we learn the more we see that Nature holds the key to what humans need to be well.

When I have a cold, I use cayenne pepper (as much as I can stand) in chicken broth, sip on that every three hours and it seems to shorten my colds.

Concentrated cinnamon is also good for blood sugar control.

Tumeric also holds promise to help with Alzheimers patients as it has the ability to break down certain buildup in the brain. A friend who is stricken has started taken 2 caps a day and we have seen some positive, albeit small, changes in her behavior. This week a drug for Alzehimers was also announced to be coming out on the market in the next couple of years. From my layman's perspective, it seemed to promise a similar type of mechanism as the tumeric did, at least from the articles I have read. Fingers crossed for hope...

I caught a cold last week and have been trying to fight it off with onions and apples (not together). Did not come across anything about turmeric or other spices when looking for info then, so thanks. Have heard folk medicine tradition of hot lemonade, either with or w/o molasses, for a cold too.
BTW have you run across stuff about sugar suppressing the immune system?

Frankly, dear friends, I have mixed feelings about research into herbs/spices because then the monolithic medical establishment might class them as drugs and take them out of our hands! They're doing it with herbs and supplements, just read the news about Canada proposing to ban supplement sales. Looks like there might be a brisk border trade of Canadian Rx drugs for American supplements in our future! Sounds hilarious if only it were not so tragic.

I had bleeding from taking too many NSAIDS and when I took tumeric I again had small traces of blood in my bowel movement. So take care. Of course these "natural" remedies are better than aftifical drugs but have respect for them.

The problem I have when I see an article like this is that someone is reaching for a conclusion without having the proof. Just last month there was an article about how a doctor found that all his diabetic patients that he had to do a gastric bypass on were "no longer diabetic"

I put that in quotes for the same reason I would for this article - because there is no proof that it affected their having diabetes; it affected the symptom - high blood sugar; and this is not the same thing; the patients still have diabetes. Just as many people do not know that they have diabetes - they are controlling it through diet and exercise - so to do these "cures"; tumeric, cinnamon, resveratrol, etc. (anti-oxidants). They work for possibly a long time (years) but the disease is doing damage in other "silent" ways (e.g. neuropathy, Hypertension or high blood pressure, P.A.D., etc.), and eventually diet, exercise are not enough

This article keeps making that mistake, thinking the symptom is the disease and as long as the symptom looks OK the disease must be gone. It doesn't work that way. I know.

Spaman, while going through all the comments above I could feel the reactions, besides turmeric how they use and want to know about the other spice materials. Somebodies admit to practically use these, like your good wife. It is the very positive trend you are promoting.