Key Points
- Consuming curcumin prevents weight gain resulting from a high fat diet.
- Curcumin inhibits high fat diet-induced inflammatory gene activity, which facilitates inflammaging — chronic low-grade inflammation associated with aging.
- Previous research has shown inflammaging adversely affects metabolism, but dietary curcumin consumption improves insulin sensitivity — a marker of metabolic health — in aged mice.
Curcumin, a molecule abundantly found in the spice turmeric, has been proposed to work against age-related diseases like obesity and metabolic disorders. Along those lines, curcumin has been shown to reduce the accumulation of senescent cells — non-proliferative cells that release inflammatory proteins and which accrue with age. In doing so, curcumin likely prevents low-grade inflammation associated with aging (inflammaging) that has detrimental effects on metabolism.
Published in Antioxidants, Kim and colleagues from Oklahoma State University show that curcumin prevents weight gain in aged mice fed a high fat and high sugar diet. Dietary curcumin also reduces gene activity for inflammatory proteins that can contribute to inflammaging. Kim and colleagues go on to show that curcumin improves insulin sensitivity, a marker for metabolic health, in aged mice. These findings suggest that curcumin suppresses inflammatory molecule gene activity associated with senescent cells during aging to reduce inflammaging, improve metabolism, and prevent weight gain with age.
Curcumin Suppresses Inflammation and Improves Metabolism to Prevent Weight Gain
To find how dietary curcumin influences weight gain, Kim and colleagues used aged (18 to 20-month-old; equivalent to 56 to 60 years old for humans) mice for their experiments. They fed some of the mice a high fat and high sugar diet, which produced substantial weight gains, but dietary curcumin substantially prevented these gains. These findings illustrate that curcumin can prevent weight gain in aged mice.
To better understand how curcumin prevents high fat and high sugar diet-induced weight gains, Kim and colleagues measured whether it prevents gene activity for inflammatory proteins. The researchers measured gene activity by looking at RNA levels to see whether curcumin suppresses activity for a particular inflammatory protein, chemokine ligand 2 (CXCL2). They found that a high fat and high sugar diet doubled CXCL2 gene activity but that dietary curcumin normalized CXCL2 gene activity. These results suggest that curcumin suppresses inflammation and resulting inflammaging to improve metabolism and prevent weight gain during aging.
To confirm that curcumin improves metabolism, Kim and colleagues administered an insulin tolerance test, where they injected mice with insulin and then measured blood sugar (glucose) levels. The researchers found that with the standard diet, dietary curcumin conferred lower blood glucose levels during the test, indicative of improved metabolism. Although curcumin didn’t produce significant results with a high fat and high sugar diet, these findings show that curcumin can improve aged mouse metabolism.
“[Curcumin] is a potent, natural therapeutic agent that acts in a multifaceted manner to protect against age-associated metabolic disorders,” said Kim and colleagues.
Supplementing Over Longer Durations and with Higher Doses May Improve Curcumin’s Effects
The study confirms that, at least in mice, curcumin prevents age-related weight gains while consuming a high fat and high sugar diet. The study’s findings point to reducing inflammatory protein gene activity associated with senescent cells to suppress inflammaging as a likely explanation for improved metabolism. Moreover, the results show that curcumin improves insulin sensitivity, which declines in prediabetes and diabetes, in aged mice. These data support that curcumin improves metabolism and possibly prevents metabolic disorders by suppressing inflammation.
Future studies should examine whether curcumin’s benefits increase with longer study durations. More studies should also find whether increasing the dosage of curcumin improves its effects on metabolism.
Comments