I added more turmeric to my diet. I knew it had a long tradition of use in Indian cooking… it’s in curry powder, for example. Why did I want to do this? It seemed to me that it might be a help to my health, based on a variety of articles I read. Here’s one: Dr. Mercolas’s video and page about turmeric. This is a sales page for particular brand of turmeric but I still thought it did a good job of talking about the spice. That brand looks just fine, too, but I am so frugal that I wanted to get the turmeric loose and then put it in capsules myself.

Here are a couple of other articles I read: a list of turmeric’s health benefits and this one from Mark Sisson, a primal writer.

My Process of Preparing Turmeric for Use

I started by buying a one-pound bag of organic turmeric powder, Frontier brand, from Amazon. I really like Frontier spices and have found them to be of good quality, so that part was easy. Frontier offers non-organic turmeric for a lower price, but considering that a bag would last a good while, I opted for organic. The label listed no other ingredients… had to go to the Frontier website to read the back of the bag.

You can also get a smaller jar of Simply Organic turmeric powder,  and then see if you want to do more.

I aleady had a big jar of organic curry powder at home, so the first thing I did was combine some turmeric with curry powder… I make curry about once a week. Well, my husband noticed the flavor difference and didn’t much like it, so I could only get away with a small addition of turmeric to the curry powder!

Next, I pulled out some empty OO gelatin capsules that I had on hand, put some turmeric powder in a shallow bowl, and filled the capsules with as much powder as I could easily push into them. I added one capsule a day to my diet without figuring out how much that was. Did it help my health? I don’t know but it certainly did no harm.

When I ran out of the capules, I would make a new batch whenever I got around to it. I did end up with yellow fingers for a while whenever I filled the capsules.

Gelatin Capsules or Vegetarian?

So far, I’ve always used gelatin capsules but I am going to shift to the vegetarian ones next time I order some. Gelatin capsules are made by manufacturers who boil connective tissues of cows, pigs, and maybe other animals, for a long time, using various chemicals as part of the purifying process.

Relatively recently, vegetarian capsules have come on the market, and they are available from a variety of sources. They are made from inert vegetable cellulose, and I’ve seen some claims that they digest more easily.

So I will be choosing empty vegetarian capsules (called vcaps or vegecaps sometimes) after this. I’ve noticed them in 0 and 00 sizes.  That link is to a search at Amazon I did on empty vegetarian capsules. The items that are first listed are exactly that, but later Amazon also lists some gelatin ones, so read the titles!

How Much Turmeric Will I be Taking?

I will experiment. I had been taking one capsule a day, may up it to two.