Question today has to do with taking Meriva, a Thorne product which is supposed to be bioactive curcumin. I took two caps every two to four hours, and I had migraines, but it never helped me. So I often had to take ibuprofen. Is that because that particular form of curcumin is not well absorbed in my body? Or just that curcumin is not anti inflammatory for me? If not what else can I use when I have a migraine or neck muscle aches instead of ibuprofen? I seem to need this almost daily.

Chris Kresser:  Curcumin doesn’t work like ibuprofen, in my experience, in that you can’t typically use it acutely. It works in a more cumulative kind of chronic way, meaning you have to take it and take it regularly for a period of time in order to experience the benefit. You can’t just take it when the migraine or headache comes on. It won’t usually work that way, so it doesn’t surprise me that you had that response. In most cases, I’ve found that people, when they don’t get results with curcumin, they’re not taking a high enough dose, although you were taking a pretty good dose. Those are 500 mg capsules. Generally, for like a therapeutic loading protocol where you really want to reduce the inflammatory load, I would say take somewhere between 2 to 4 g a day and do that for two to three weeks, and see if that has an impact rather than taking it once you get a headache. Then you could switch to more maintenance dose like 1 g a day or something like that.

We have studies of people taking 1 or 2 g a day for up to two years I think that have shown to be safe. Beyond that, we don’t know much about the long-term safety, but hopefully that’s enough time to make a dent and kind of hit the reset button on the body.