Wednesday, August 24, 2011

Worldwide shortage of curcumin

A worldwide shortage of natural curcumin has driven the price of raw materials up and material of questionable integrity has begun to appear in the marketplace. While we work very little with this substance, we wanted to alert you so you can do your due diligence. This would be especially important for those taking it for cancer prevention or complementary treatment. Make sure the curcumin manufacturing plants, suppliers and third-party analytical labs are complying with the extraction process required for high curcuminoid standardizations.

In addition, synthetic curcumin has entered the marketplace providing an inexpensive means to circumvent both supply chain and processing issues. Each batch of curcumin extracts should be tested by HPLC (High Performance Liquid Chromatography), allowing manufacturers and suppliers to elucidate the nature of the material as natural or synthetic. Synthetic curcumin is indicated by a single curcuminoid peak while natural curcumin has three distinct curcuminoid peaks.

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