Supplement manufacturers are limited to making “health claims”, such as “cranberry juice supports bladder health”, BUT you cannot say “cranberry juice is effective against bladder infections” because that is a disease claim.

Health claims are limited to statements about reducing disease risk, and must not venture into claims about the cure, mitigation, treatment, or prevention of a disease.

Shaklee’s new Turmeric Boost is being promoted for its well-documented antioxidant properties. But is that all there is? The main “active” ingredient in the turmeric spice is curcumin.   [1]

A quick search on PubMed [2] (the National Library of Medicine’s peer-reviewed search tool) for the terms curcumin AND disease yielded 6,070 results, and similar searches for the following issues yielded:

• cancer (7,168),

• cancer prevention (1,635),

• gastrointestinal disease (1,096),

• neurodegerative disease (1,052),

• diabetes (1,103) and

• osteoarthritis (202).

Clearly the scientific community is very interested in this phytonutrient.

Those articles include the full spectrum, from simple lab test reports through clinical animal and human trials, and as the evidence mounts, published systematic reviews and eventually meta-analyses of all the previous studies are produced.

The best indicator of how important a particular ingredient may be is whether drug manufacturers are trying to make a synthetic version that they can then patent. The other Big Thing is developing new and unique delivery mechanism called nano-particles.

You can’t patent a spice like Turmeric, but by gosh you CAN patent a medical delivery device to contain a hard-to-absorb spice, and perhaps win yourself a coveted Nobel Prize. This is where cancer research is right now. [3],   [4],   [5]

In a search for “Curcumin AND nanoparticles” there are already 2,786 entries for that search. WOW.

Certain diseases like bladder cancer don’t respond well to chemotherapy or radiation treatments.
A group of Iranian clinical researchers just wrote:

“Numerous investigations have been carried out to search for appropriate complementary treatments or adjuvants for bladder cancer therapy.”

(Adjuvants are a substance which enhances the body's immune response).   [3]

“Curcumin, a phenolic component with a wide spectrum of biological activities, has recently been (proposed) as a potential anticancer agent. It has been shown that this agent exerts its therapeutic effects via targeting a wide range of cellular and molecular pathways involved in bladder cancer (development).”   [4]

On August 24, 2020, Brazilian researchers at the Department of Biochemistry and Nutrition
stated that:

“Curcumin produces relevant anti-inflammatory and antioxidant effects that are crucial in inducing remission in ulcerative colitis (UC) patients.

Unfortunately, in the treatment of UC, we have not observed studies with standardization of dose and routes of administration. Existing meta-analyses are biased because they compare studies using different administration routes and patients in different stages of the disease.”   [6]

This is the biggest problem with nutrient studies:
a lack of standardized purity testing and proper clinical dosages.

This also happens to be where Shaklee excels, because once they review the health benefits provided by a particular phytonutrient, [7] they develop a method to standardize it at the highest possible concentration, and then determine the proper dosage to achieve a clinical health benefit.

This includes testing to determine how much of it reaches the blood stream. That work is what makes Shaklee’s Turmeric Boost the best absorbed curcumin product on the market.

Curcuminoids, the class of active compounds found in turmeric, have been shown to be rather poorly absorbed. So Shaklee discovered that a black pepper extract named piperine [8] dramatically increases the absorption and bioavailability of those delicate compounds.

The next step was to standardize their formula to contain the highest possible concentration of curcuminoids (95%) and piperine (95%) [9], while using an all-natural extraction method to avoid contamination from the reagents used by most manufacturers who retail turmeric products.

Safety Always Comes First