The Hidden Dangers of Turmeric

I've been a nurse for 28 years. I'm the one who put my mom on turmeric.

I'm also the one who told her to switch to the stronger one.

In my family, I'm the one everybody calls. A rash, a new prescription, a strange pain at 2 a.m. They call me first.

So when Mom's knees started getting worse a few years ago, she called me. I told her what I'd told my patients for 10 years. Try turmeric first. It's natural. It's easier on the stomach than Advil.

She took a capsule with her coffee every morning for 3 years. She never missed a day.

Last winter, she called me at work. Mom never calls me at work.

Her yearly blood work had come back. Her liver numbers were 5 times higher than normal. Her doctor wanted to see her that week.

She felt fine. She said it twice. I think she was trying to convince herself.

She doesn't drink. She wasn't taking Tylenol. Nothing else in her blood work was off.

I drove over after my shift. The turmeric was on her kitchen windowsill, right next to her coffee mug. The "extra strength" bottle. The one I'd told her to buy.

Her doctor had her stop it that day.

Over the next 8 weeks, her liver numbers came back down to normal.

Her knees were another story.

What the NIH Says

I couldn't sleep that night. So I sat at my kitchen table and looked up turmeric on the NIH's own website.

Their page on turmeric doesn't recommend the high-dose supplements for more than about 4 months at a time.

Mom had been on hers for 3 years. That's 9 times longer.

And she wasn't the only one. I'd been telling patients to take turmeric for 10 years. I'd never once told them when to stop.

The Label I Never Read

I'd brought Mom's bottle home with me. I turned it over and read the label properly for the first time.

It said 95% curcuminoids. It said "high absorption."

I'd seen those words on hundreds of bottles. I'd never stopped to think about what they meant.

A pinch of turmeric in a curry has never hurt anyone. That's because the body can barely absorb plain turmeric. Most of it passes straight through.

That's also why the first turmeric pills barely did anything.

So supplement companies went to work on it.

Turmeric root is about 3% curcumin, the part that calms inflammation. Most of the popular capsules today are 95% curcumin. That's about 30 times stronger than the spice.

Then they built formulas to force more of it into the blood. Some labels claim 20 times more. Some claim over 100 times more.

It worked. Far more turmeric reaches the blood now.

And everything that reaches the blood has to be cleared by the liver.

Mom's liver had been clearing a capsule 30 times stronger than the spice. Every morning, for 3 years.

Mom wasn't a fluke. In 2019, Italy's health ministry put out a warning after more than 20 people turned up with liver damage. Every one of them had been taking turmeric.

A few years later, Australia started requiring a liver warning on turmeric labels.

In the US, there's a network of doctors that tracks liver damage from supplements. Turmeric is now one of the most common herbs behind the cases it tracks. Most of them involved the concentrated kind. The capsules that say "extra strength" or "high absorption."

The kind I'd told Mom to switch to.

Mom did everything right. She picked the natural option to stay off pills. I'm the one who picked the bottle.

And there's no way to know how fast it will happen. Mom took it for 3 years before her blood work caught it. Some people in those cases had been taking it for only a few months.

There's usually nothing to feel while it's happening. No pain. No warning. Mom felt fine the whole time.

Most people find out in 1 of 2 ways. A blood test, if they happen to get one. Or the whites of their eyes turning yellow. By the time the eyes turn yellow, the liver is already badly damaged.

Mom found out from a blood test. She got lucky.

Her best friend Diane didn't.

Tuesday Card Night

Mom plays cards every Tuesday with 5 women. One is her sister, my Aunt Joyce. One is her best friend, Diane. The other 3 have known me since I was in braces.

Mom had told every one of them about turmeric. She told them her daughter the nurse said so.

The next Tuesday, I went with her. Diane's chair was empty.

She'd been in the hospital for 6 days.

She'd been taking the same extra strength turmeric as Mom. For 8 months, not 3 years. She hadn't had blood work in over a year. She found out when her daughter noticed the whites of her eyes had turned yellow.

Her liver was badly damaged. Her liver numbers still aren't normal today.

Mom took it for 3 years and got lucky. Diane took it for 8 months and didn't. Nobody can tell ahead of time which one a person will be.

I sat in Diane's chair and asked the rest of them 1 question.

Not counting Mom, 3 of the 4 women at that table were taking turmeric. Joyce and Barb had the same extra strength bottle as Mom.

Not one of them had heard about the 4 months. Barb had been taking hers for 6 years.

Not one of them had told her doctor. So no doctor knew to check their livers.

I asked Joyce where she'd heard about turmeric.

She looked at me like I should already know. "Your mom said you told her to take it."

Barb laughed when I asked how long hers had worked. "Mine quit on me twice. I'm on my third brand."

I didn't think much about that part until later.

I made every woman at that table promise to get a liver check that week.

Joyce's results came back 2 days later. Her liver numbers were high. Not as high as Diane's.

Not yet.

Mom's Stairs

Mom's liver numbers went back to normal. Her knees got worse.

Without the turmeric, even the little help she'd been getting was gone.

Around then, I stayed with her for a weekend.

At 6 in the morning, I found her sitting on the edge of her bed, waiting for her knees to loosen up. She called it letting them wake up.

She'd been doing it every morning for 2 years. She'd never once mentioned it to me.

She went up the stairs sideways, one hand on the rail, one step at a time. She left the laundry basket at the bottom. "For later," she said.

"Later" meant me carrying it up.

That afternoon, my son brought out his board game. He and Grandma have played it on the living room floor every Saturday since he was 4.

Mom got down on the rug with him. It took her a while.

Getting back up took 2 tries, the arm of the couch and my son pulling on her hand.

He's 9. He shouldn't know how to help his grandma off the floor.

That night, Mom told me her plan.

"I'm going back on the turmeric. Half a capsule. Or 4 months on and a month off, like that website says."

I didn't have an answer for her.

Mom's first bottle had stopped helping after about a year. That's why I'd told her to switch. Barb's had quit on her twice. I'd never once asked why.

So I asked Mom for 2 weeks to find out, before she swallowed another capsule.

She gave me 2 weeks. Not a day more.

Why Turmeric Can't Keep Up

I spent those 2 weeks reading research papers after my shifts.

I've been a nurse long enough to know how easy it is to fool people with bad research. A study on 12 mice. A study done in a lab dish. A study with 8 people and no one to compare them against. Almost anything can be made to look like it works.

So I only trusted what held up in real people. And what showed up more than once.

Most people think inflammation is what wrecks a knee. The research says it's what's supposed to fix it.

Mom has hosted Thanksgiving for 40 years. She's on her feet from 6 in the morning until the last dish is dried.

All that standing and walking causes tiny bits of wear inside the knee. That's normal. It happens to everyone, every day.

The body's answer to that wear is inflammation. It sends extra blood and repair cells to the knee. That's the swelling and soreness Mom felt every Friday after Thanksgiving.

Then the immune system finishes the repair and cleans up the inflammation. By Monday, Mom's knees were always fine.

The cleanup is the step that matters most. If it happens, the knee heals. If it doesn't, the inflammation stays. It builds a little more with every walk and every staircase. And inflammation that sits in a knee for years starts eating away the cartilage.

That's what's behind about 90% of the knee pain I see in women over 50. Inflammation that isn't getting cleaned up anymore.

It also explained the strange split in the turmeric research.

For some people with osteoarthritis, turmeric took the edge off. For others, it did nothing at all.

The difference came down to how much inflammation had already built up in the knee.

When the build-up was small, turmeric was strong enough to keep it down.

When it had been building for years, turmeric was too weak to make a dent.

And the build-up doesn't stay the same size. It grows a little every year.

So even when turmeric works, it's holding back a pile that keeps getting bigger. Sooner or later, the pile gets too big for it.

That's what happened to Mom's first bottle. And Barb's first 2 brands.

No brand fixes that. A stronger capsule only adds a few more months. And it sends even more turmeric through the liver. That's how Diane ended up in the hospital.

But none of that explained why Mom's body had stopped doing the cleanup.

For most of those 40 years, her knees were fine by the Monday after Thanksgiving. Last year, she was still limping at Christmas.

Something had switched off her cleanup. And nobody had ever told her what. Not her doctor. Not me.

There was 1 clue I'd ignored for years.

Mom's knees didn't start hurting at 40 or 45. They started a few years after her periods stopped.

In 28 years of nursing, I'd never put those 2 things together. So I went looking for anyone who had.

Arthritis of the Menopause

The oldest paper I found was from 1925. It described Mom almost exactly.

It was written by 2 doctors in New York. They'd noticed something about the women coming to them with new knee arthritis. Most of them were around the same age. And for most of them, their periods had recently stopped.

They called it "arthritis of the menopause."

Then the medical world forgot about it for almost 100 years. Knee pain in women went back to being called wear and tear. That's still what Mom's doctor calls it.

But the newer research kept pointing back to those 2 doctors.

Women are 8 times more likely than men to get knee osteoarthritis. If it were just wear and tear, it would be close to even. Men walk on their knees too.

I don't trust mouse studies on their own. But one matched what those doctors saw in 1925. When scientists removed the ovaries from lab mice, which works the same as menopause, the mice's knees developed osteoarthritis.

That's 3 kinds of evidence, nearly 100 years apart, all saying the same thing. Menopause and knee arthritis are connected.

But none of those papers explained how menopause switches off the cleanup inside a knee.

By then, I had 4 days left on Mom's 2 weeks.

The answer was in a completely different set of papers. Papers about the immune system.

Menopause is when the body stops making most of its estrogen.

So whatever estrogen had been doing for Mom's knees stopped when her periods did.

I knew estrogen did a lot of things. I didn't know it controlled the cleanup.

It controls a group of immune cells called regulatory T cells. Their job is to switch inflammation off once the repair is done. Think of them as the body's cleanup crew.

In women, estrogen is what sends that crew to the joints.

So after menopause, the crew stops showing up. The inflammation from every walk and every staircase stays. It builds. And it starts eating at the cartilage.

That's why Mom was still limping at Christmas.

Estrogen drops all over the body. Mom's elbows were fine, though.

That's because estrogen never made the inflammation. It only kept it cleaned up. The inflammation comes from use.

Every stair puts about 4 times a person's body weight through each knee. Elbows have never carried anyone up a staircase.

The knees do the most work. So they make the most inflammation. And when the crew stops coming, the knees are where it piles up first.

The build-up takes years to show up as pain. That's why it can feel like it came out of nowhere.

By the end of those 2 weeks, my son had stopped bringing out the board game. Every time he did, Grandma said, "Not today, buddy."

The Danger Underneath

Now I could see what Mom's turmeric had been up against.

Turmeric doesn't bring the cleanup crew back. It mops up a little inflammation from the outside, at the same strength every day.

Every stair adds to the pile. Every day, for years.

So the pile outgrows the turmeric.

And while turmeric is still taking the edge off, the knees feel a little better. So nobody checks what's happening inside the knee. And inside, the build-up is eating cartilage the whole time.

Cartilage that's gone doesn't come back.

Diane's liver scared me. This scares me more. It's happening in almost every woman whose knees got worse after 50. And turmeric hides it.

It doesn't show up on a blood test. It shows up on the stairs, a few years later.

I'd been watching it happen on Mom's stairs for 2 years.

On the last day of the 2 weeks, I told Mom the truth about her plan.

Half a capsule is too weak for a build-up that grows every time she climbs the stairs.

The full-strength kind is the kind the NIH says not to take for more than about 4 months. It's also the kind that put Diane in the hospital.

And 4 months on, 1 month off just lets the build-up grow during every break.

At any dose, the build-up wins.

Mom didn't say anything for a long time. Finally she said, "So I'm out of options."

The Car Ride

I took a day off work the next week and drove her to the orthopedist. Mom hates being driven anywhere. She didn't argue that day.

The X-ray showed her left knee was bone on bone.

He offered her a shot every few months until it got bad enough for a replacement. That was the whole plan.

Her regular doctor had already told her she was too far past menopause to start hormones. Advil tears up her stomach. And she couldn't go back on turmeric.

She really was out of options.

I knew where that road went. I've watched it with patients for 28 years. First the cane. Then the walker. Then most of the day in a chair.

On the drive home, she didn't say a word for 20 minutes.

Then she said, "I spent my whole life taking care of you. I never wanted you taking care of me."

I pulled into her driveway. Neither of us got out of the car for a while.

The Nobel Prize and the Cleanup Crew

That night, Mom texted me a photo. A new bottle of turmeric on her kitchen counter. Under it, she wrote, "Just in case."

I didn't sleep that night either.

If the cleanup crew had stopped coming, the answer was never a stronger anti-inflammatory. The answer was getting the crew back.

So I went back to the research on the crew itself.

The first thing that came up was last year's Nobel Prize in medicine. Shimon Sakaguchi, the scientist who discovered these cells, had just shared it. He'd spent years being told they didn't exist.

These cells are the body's own anti-inflammatory. And they're strong. About 12 times stronger than turmeric.

Turmeric fights inflammation from the outside. So does anything else you swallow to fight it. None of it will ever be as strong as the body's own cleanup crew.

Mom didn't need something else to fight the inflammation. She needed something that would send the crew back to her knees.

Around 2 in the morning, I found it. It was on the same NIH website.

There were over 20 human studies on it for osteoarthritis.

Plenty of supplements have a stack of studies behind them. Most fall apart once you actually read them. So I read these the way I'd read the research on a new drug.

This one held up to everything I check for.

Most doctors still never mention it. It isn't a procedure. A clinic can bill for a cortisone shot every 3 months. Nobody can bill for a scoop in the morning coffee.

It's called UC-II. Undenatured type 2 collagen.

Mom's Kitchen Table

I printed everything and drove to Mom's before work.

The new bottle of turmeric was sitting next to her coffee. Still sealed.

She read the first page of what I'd printed and pushed it back across the table.

"Collagen. I took collagen for a whole year. My nails never looked better. My knees didn't change one bit."

She wasn't wrong. Regular collagen is a building material. The body breaks it into pieces and uses them for skin, hair and nails. That's why her nails changed and her knees didn't.

UC-II works a completely different way.

Part of the immune system's job is to protect the body's own tissue.

UC-II is a small piece of the same collagen cartilage is made of. It's kept in its natural shape.

When it passes through the gut, the immune system gets a good look at it. It learns exactly what cartilage looks like.

So it sends the cleanup crew to the cartilage to protect it. That calms the inflammation right where it's building up. Doctors call this oral tolerance.

It's the job estrogen used to do.

Mom picked the papers back up.

"I'm not putting anything else in my body that my liver has to deal with. Not after Diane."

That was the first thing I'd checked.

Turmeric has to flood the blood to do anything. That's why the capsules keep getting stronger.

UC-II doesn't fight the inflammation itself. It just shows the immune system what to protect. So it only takes a tiny dose. The dose in the studies is 40 mg. That's about the weight of 2 grains of rice. Most turmeric doses are over 1,000 mg a day.

And 40 mg leaves the liver almost nothing to clear.

"That little won't do anything," Mom said.

I'd thought the same thing.

In one 90-day study, 52 people with knee osteoarthritis were split into 2 groups. One group took glucosamine and chondroitin, the best-selling joint supplement in America. That was 2,700 mg a day. The other group took 40 mg of UC-II.

After 90 days, pain in the UC-II group dropped by almost half. In the glucosamine group, it dropped 13%.

Their stiffness went down almost twice as much. Their daily life score improved 3 times more.

More trials have backed it up since. One was in women aged 60 to 80 with knee osteoarthritis. These were women who held the rail on every stair.

By the end, they were walking the dog without stopping to rest. Some were kneeling in the garden and getting back up on their own. Most were sleeping through the night.

Mom read that part twice.

Then she put her hand on her left knee. "It's not going to give me this back."

It won't. Cartilage that's already gone isn't coming back. No pill, shot or supplement can do that.

But the pain doesn't come from cartilage that's already gone. It comes from cartilage that's still breaking down. That's what the build-up does to it every day.

Stop the build-up, and the cartilage stops breaking down. What's gone stays gone. But the pain from it breaking down stops.

She nodded. Then she slid the sealed bottle of turmeric across the table to me and asked me the name of it again.

My Second Mistake

That was my second mistake.

I told her the name before I'd found a good one.

Mom ordered the bestseller on Amazon that night. She's 71, and she doesn't wait for anybody.

Within a week, her stomach was a mess. She was constipated for 5 days straight.

I read that label the way I should have read the turmeric one.

Nothing on it said it had the 40 mg from the studies. Nothing on it said anyone outside the company had ever tested what was inside.

UC-II is hard to make. It's a fragile molecule. Keeping it intact is expensive. So most brands cut corners. They put in less than the dose from the studies. And with nobody checking, some have heavy metals and fillers that have no business being in there.

The supplement industry is barely regulated. Anyone can put anything in a bottle and sell it on Amazon. It's the same reason turmeric capsules got 30 times stronger without anyone stopping them.

I'd made the same mistake twice. I'd trusted a bottle without checking it.

This time, I checked everything before I said another word to her.

Only 1 brand checked every box. Balmve.

They're a small company. They make it in the USA. Every batch gets checked by an outside lab before it ships.

It's a powder called More Than Collagen. It's 1 scoop a day in coffee or water. No capsules.

That mattered to Mom. She'd swallowed a capsule with her coffee every morning for 3 years.

They aren't on Amazon, so I emailed them to ask why.

They wrote back that UC-II is so expensive to make that they keep only a small profit on each bag. Selling on Amazon would mean raising the price by about $15 to cover the fees. They didn't want to do that to their customers. So they only sell it on their own website.

That told me a lot about who I was dealing with.

I needed to know 1 more thing. Mom lives on Social Security. She's spent plenty on things that didn't work.

Balmve told me that if it doesn't help within 60 days, people can contact them and get every penny back.

So I ordered Mom the 4-bag bundle.

What Happened to Mom

Every morning, the scoop went into the same mug that used to sit next to the turmeric.

The first week, nothing.

Mom called me on day 8. "I told you. Collagen."

I asked her for the full 60 days. She agreed, mostly to prove me wrong.

Around week 3, she stopped complaining about her knees on the phone. It took me a few days to notice.

In the second month, I came over on a Saturday morning. The laundry basket was sitting full at the bottom of the stairs.

Mom came down, picked it up and carried it up the stairs. Facing forward. Her hand never touched the rail.

I stood at the bottom of those stairs and didn't say a word.

The next month, she drove herself to her checkup. I didn't have to take a day off work. Her liver numbers were normal. They've been normal at every check since.

And one Saturday, I walked into the living room and found her on the floor with my son, halfway through their board game.

When they finished, she got up on her own. No couch. No hand to pull on.

This time, he didn't have to ask. She'd brought the game out herself.

Aunt Joyce stopped her turmeric the day her results came back. She started More Than Collagen the same month as Mom. Her liver numbers are back to normal too.

Diane is back at card night. Her liver numbers still aren't normal. She asks me about every pill she takes now.

Everyone at that table wanted to know what Mom was taking.

Barb is bone on bone in both knees. She had a replacement on the calendar for this fall. A few months after she started, her surgeon told her to put it off. He told her to keep doing whatever she was doing.

Since then, I've recommended it to more than 50 of my patients. Not one has asked for that refund.

Get the 4-bag bundle. It's what I got Mom.

UC-II takes a few weeks to build up. Most people really start noticing it in the second month. So 4 bags lasts just long enough to see what it does.

The 4-bag bundle normally costs $120.

I'll be honest. I winced when I first saw that. It's a lot of money for 4 bags of powder. Mom's on Social Security. She counts every dollar.

But then I thought about what the other road was already costing her. The turmeric. The Advil. A shot every few months. A day off work for me every time she needed a ride. And a knee replacement at the end of it that costs more than her car.

Then I scrolled down.

Right now they're running an early Black Friday sale. The same 4-bag bundle is $79.

That's about $1.52 a day. Less than a cup of coffee.

They also have a buy one, get one deal. That's 2 bags for $50. I'd still get the 4. Most people start noticing it in the second month. But a 2-bag order runs out at about 4 weeks.

And if it doesn't help within 60 days, they send back every penny.

I don't know how long the sale lasts. When it ends, it goes back to $120.

So if it's still $79 when you click, don't sit on it. Grab the 4 bags.

Their website also has the full 90-day study. There's even a chart that scores turmeric, Advil, cortisone and the rest on 1 thing, whether it brings the cleanup crew back.

Tap here to see it, and get the 4 bags while it's $79:

More Than Collagen, 4-bag bundle

$120$79early Black Friday price

About $1.52 a day

Or buy one, get one: 2 bags for $50

60-day money-back guarantee

See the study and the $79 bundle

I know exactly where the other road goes. I almost watched my mom go down it.

If she'd gone back on the turmeric, nothing would have looked wrong for a while. The edge would have come off. She'd have told everyone she was fine.

Underneath, the build-up would have kept eating her cartilage. Every staircase. Every Thanksgiving. Every single day.

The capsules would have gotten stronger. Her liver would have done a little more work every year. Any one of those years, she could have ended up like Diane.

Then Advil on the bad days. Then a shot every few months. Then the replacement.

Then months of someone helping her in and out of the shower. That someone would have been me.

And my son would have put the board game away for good.

I've watched patients walk that road for 28 years. I just never thought I'd see my own mother start down it.

Every month on the old road is another month of cartilage that isn't coming back. Don't give it another month.

Click here and get the 4-bag bundle while it's still $79:

If someone you love takes turmeric, send this to them. Nobody told my mom. Not even me.

Mom still cooks with turmeric. It's just not her knee medicine anymore.

She's hosting Thanksgiving again this year. She told me to bring a pie and stay out of her kitchen.