Curcumin is well known for its powerful anti-inflammatory effects. But did you know new research is showing a surprising new benefit to curcumin - it can help repair damaged muscles too!

Downhill running (especially in legs that are unaccustomed to it) causes more muscle damage than uphill or level running. This damage occurs from what’s known as eccentric loading, or the mechanical stress that occurs when muscles are contracting under a load or tension.

Watch our video and learn how to repair muscle damage with curcumin.

When we run downhill the muscles are still lengthening, but they’re also under a load and generating a braking force against gravity and this leads to a very specific set of muscle damage:

1. Muscle fiber tears

2. Capillary rupture and bleeding in and around the muscle tissue

3. Inflammatory cytokines are released

4. Oxidative stress on the muscle cells' DNA

5. Fibrosis, or scarring

6. Functional deficits, or inability of the muscle to contract and relax normally

Aside from its powerful anti-inflammatory effects, new research shows that curcumin can actually stimulate muscle repair from eccentric damage. It does this by:

1. Increases muscle mass significantly after injury compared to the group that didn’t use it, but this didn’t increase weight. (So, you can't take curcumin to get big muscles, but it will replace damaged cells with new healthy ones).

2. Improved functional recovery - gait was normal compared to non-treated group.

3. Accelerates recovery to normal muscle architecture after injury, meaning less scarring.

4. Increases the production of a protein known as desmin, which in turn stimulates the release and growth of muscle satellite cells, which are the cells that go in and repair damaged muscle fibers.

The anti-inflamatory effects of curcumin are pretty incredible, too. It has a similar spectrum of anti-inflammatory effects as do non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDS) but without the serious side effects like gut bleeding, inhibition of cartilage repair, and cardiovascular events.

Further, its mild-in-comparison anti-inflammatory effect compared to NSAIDs is something we like to use because repeated use of NSAIDs completely remove all aspects of inflammation thereby actually crippling the repair and adaptation processes.  You do need some inflammation to orchestrate the healing process. 

Curcumin is pretty incredible stuff!

Our curcumin is the BCM-95 curcumin which is 6-7x more absorbed that standard curcumin. This is achieved because this curcumin is produced with it’s own essential oils which are responsible for the more rapid absorption and longer time in the bloodstream.