Monday 5 April 2010

Black Pepper is pretty Hot Stuff.

Black Pepper contains a substance called Piperine that gives the hot sensation. It just so happens that Piperine increases the bio-availability of several important substances.

1) Curcumin: This substance has many health benefits, an important one being the slowing, halting or even reversing of amyloid plaque formation in the brain, as mentioned in Look after your brain. See Influence of piperine on the pharmacokinetics of curcumin in animals and human volunteers.

2) Beta-carotene: See Piperine, an alkaloid derived from black pepper increases serum response of beta-carotene during 14-days of oral beta-carotene supplementation.

3) Coenzyme Q10: See Piperine derived from black pepper increases the plasma levels of coenzyme q10 following oral supplementation.

Capsaicin, the hot stuff in chilli peppers is also quite useful.

6 comments:

Daniel said...

The problem with piperine is that it alters the metabolism of drugs.

Nigel Kinbrum said...

Inhibiting the metabolism of certain drugs is a problem unless the dosage of those drugs can be reduced to compensate.

Neonomide said...

Hi,

"Concomitant administration of piperine 20 mg produced much higher concentrations from 0.25 to 1 h post drug (P < 0.01 at 0.25 and 0.5 h; P < 0.001 at 1 h), the increase in bioavailability was 2000%."

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9619120


Your wheat post below is awesome, by the way. Makes my work much easier in "promoting" wheat here. ^^

Have a nice day !

Nigel Kinbrum said...

Sorry JoAnn Lennon. No spam allowed (may contain black pepper).

Gabriel said...

Any idea on the proportion turmeric/black pepper to use?

Nigel Kinbrum said...

Sadly, no. When mum was taking turmeric tablets, they contained 1g of turmeric concentrate (equivalent to ~5g of turmeric).

I don't know how much black pepper is required to provide 20mg of piperine.