Turmeric is a spice that comes out of a plant in the ginger family, Zingiberaceae, called Curcuma longa. Indigenous to Indonesia and southern India, this perennial herbaceous plant needs exotic conditions to develop. It is cultivated in India as well as the surrounding islands in the Indian Ocean and in Southeast Asia.
Turmeric appears to have been used since antiquity because of its color, aroma and taste. It was utilized as a spice and as a perfume during biblical times. It has an earthy, mustard like smell and tastes a bit of peppery and more or less bitter.
The rhizomes, and underground stems, of the turmeric plant are a bright orange-yellow color that the plant is cultivated. The rhizomes are harvested as well as taken by way of a a boiling process. They are sun-dried for about a week and after that polished in a turning drum or manually rubbing. Before starting this process to help make the spice some rhizomes with growth buds are re-planted for the next crop.
The dried rhizomes are 1 to 3 inches in length. These yellow-orange roots are pulverized to produce the spice. best turmeric essential oil brands (recent post by www.homernews.com) is typically purchased in the powder form, but a few local Asian cuisines use turmeric as a root vegetable.
Cooks use turmeric as a spice, condiment, and coloring agent for a lot of food items. Foods that use turmeric include cheese dishes, rice dishes, dressings, fish, seafood, eggs, poultry dishes, pork, pickles, sauces, relishes and soups. Commercially prepared mustards as well as pickles are colorized with turmeric.
Turmeric is not utilized often as a clothing dye, except in India to dye conventional saris, because fabric dyed with turmeric fades in the sunshine. The bright yellow color is due to a chemical called curcumin. When it is employed for the yellow orange color of its as an alternative or maybe substitute for the more high-priced saffron in cooking, turmeric may be referred to as "Indian saffron".
The yellow-colored compound, curcumin, stands out as the active component of healing remedies using turmeric. Curcumin has antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties and it's being further researched for its potential for treating inflammatory bowel disease, rheumatoid arthritis, cystic fibrosis, Alzheimer's disease as well as cancer. Curcumin has been found to improve liver function and lower blood cholesterol.
The medical claims for turmeric or curcumin appear to be a lot more than only folklore. The U.S. National Institutes of Health oversees medical research that investigates the promises of potential new drugs. For a drug making it to clinical trials, in which humans are given the drug, the potential new medicine should have passed a number of non clinical trials to display the drug for being safe and effective. Non-clinical trials are carried out in labs together with lower life forms for instance bacteria, mice, rabbits and rats. In 2010 twenty-three clinical trials were either completed, ongoing or starting up to study the effects of curcumin in treating several diseases, including diabetes, kidney disease, osteoarthritis, rheumatoid arthritis, lymphoma, irritable bowel disease, cystic fibrosis, major depressive disorder, psoriasis, and various cancers.