Like soy, the spice turmeric may also suppress human fat cells, and not only have an antiproliferative effect on human cancer cells, but may prevent cancer metastases by inhibiting cancer cell invasion. The main turmeric compound is even being considered as a leading treatment for multidrug resistant breast cancer.
If it’s that good for you, why not take a lot of it. Not some extract, but actual turmeric, the whole food, but just in large doses—three grams; six or seven capsules a day. Is this a bad idea? Does it not matter either way? Or the more the better? Unfortunately, it turns out tumeric has too much oxalate to take that kind of daily dose, which would increase risk of kidney stones. And anyone who thinks kidney stones aren’t the big deal has never passed an oxalate kidney stone out through their urethra. So keep it under a teaspoon of turmeric a day.
Notice the title, though what about cinnamon? Like tumeric cinnamon seems to have all sorts of amazing benefits, but also like tumeric is high in oxalates. In fact cinnamon has the same amount of oxalates that turmeric does, so is a spoonful of cinnamon too much too? Harmful, harmless, or helpful?
Even a few spoonfuls a day is not too much, because it’s not what you eat, it’s what you absorb, and while cinnamon and turmeric have the same amount of oxalates, more than 90% of the tumeric oxalates are soluble, versus less than 10% of those from the cinnamon.
To get the benefits, though, you’ve got to eat cinnamon every day. After just a single day of eating a daily teaspoon of cinnamon you can see with the dotted line how well it blunts the blood sugar spike you get when you eat a whopping load of sugar. On day 15 they stopped eating cinnamon, though, and you can see by the next day the effect was gone. So we have to keep it up.
