One of the many health-promoting aspects of turmeric is its direct impact on your immune system. In fact, there are several ways in which turmeric promotes immunity and enhances your body's defenses against infection and disease.
Six of the most well-researched ways that turmeric can enhance the function of your immune system include:
1. Turmeric for Healthy Inflammation
Did you know that inflammation is healthy when it happens in small doses? In fact, acute inflammation is your body’s way of protecting against injury or infection. This internal defense system can look like an area becoming swollen, hot, red, or painful. (The Latin word for inflammation, inflammare, literally means “to set on fire”.) This short-term inflammatory response is crucial for healing but can become dangerous when it persists and becomes chronic (5)...
Chronic inflammation happens when the inflammatory response doesn't resolve, and your immune system continues to signal that there's injury. This results in a continued state of imbalance in your body, which becomes a risk factor for several diseases such as metabolic syndrome, degenerative brain disease, cardiovascular disease, cancer, and diabetes (6, 7).
With turmeric’s powerful anti-inflammatory activity, it can help support your body and protect against inflammatory conditions like arthritis, metabolic syndrome, hyperlipidemia (a risk factor for heart disease), and even anxiety (8). By helping to calm your natural inflammatory response, turmeric effectively preserves your immune system.
2. Turmeric for Antioxidants
Antioxidants play a protective role in your body and support your immune system in fighting against free radicals (also known as reactive oxygen species or ROS), which cause oxidative damage (9).
Much like inflammation, oxidative stress is a natural byproduct of your body's normal functioning. With that being said, the balance of antioxidants to oxidative stress in your body is key. When the scales tip in the direction of oxidative stress and you don't have enough antioxidants to balance it out, damage to your cells and tissues can occur.
Turmeric possesses antioxidant activity that can help combat excessive oxidation and bring your body back into balance. Research shows that it exerts its antioxidant effects by neutralizing free radicals and enhancing antioxidant enzymes (10, 11).
3. Gut Health
Your gut plays a crucial and very active role in the function of your immune system. In fact, around 70% of your immune system lives in your gut (12).
Turmeric supports gut immunity by promoting balance in your gut microbiome (the millions of bacteria that live in your gut). Your gut microbiome is pivotal to your immune health—it even trains your immune cells to maintain a state of equilibrium called immune homeostasis.
Put simply, when your microbiome is in balance, it helps fight off invaders. When it's out of balance, however, the symbiotic relationship between your microbiome and your immune system falls apart and conditions like autoimmunity, inflammation, and infection can occur (13, 14).
So how does your gut microbiome become imbalanced? Factors such as poor diet, stress, environmental toxins, and chronic inflammation are all known to play a contributing role (15, 16).
To combat this, science is showing that turmeric plays a protective role in the beneficial bacteria in your gut, effectively enhancing your defenses against viruses. In fact, research shows that turmeric may have a direct impact on your gut immunity by enhancing the growth of beneficial bacteria while reducing pathogenic strains (17, 18).
4. Antiviral Properties
Along with its anti-inflammatory, antioxidant, and gut health properties, turmeric also boosts antiviral activity in your body. Curcumin, specifically, has been shown to display antiviral effects on a range of viruses, including influenza, HIV, herpes, Zika, and more (11).
Viruses work by inserting information into cells (human cells, bacteria cells, etc.) that contain instructions to make more of the virus. This allows for rapid replication of the virus while disrupting the function of healthy cells.
Research shows that curcumin's antiviral activity and ability to hinder replication may be due to several potential mechanisms (19, 20).
- It may directly kill the virus before it’s able to infect the cell.
- It integrates with the viral instructions and inactivates the virus.
- It alters the metabolism of healthy cells to prevent viral entry.
In addition to its antiviral activity, researchers also report antimicrobial, antibacterial, and antifungal activity of curcumin (21).
5. Improves Respiration
One of the traditional uses for turmeric, dating back about 5,000 years, was to support respiratory health. Modern application of turmeric backs up this ancient remedy as it shows protective activity against both acute and chronic lung disease.
Two markers of lung disease include inflammation and oxidation. When your lung tissue becomes damaged by these out-of-balance immune responses, it can make it harder to breathe as the inflammation constricts your airways and free radicals wreak havoc on the cells that line your respiratory tract.
Turmeric—a potent anti-inflammatory and antioxidant compound—has been shown to support lung health and play a protective role in several respiratory diseases, including chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), acute lung injury, acute respiratory distress syndrome, and allergic asthma (22).
In addition to its anti-inflammatory and antioxidant activity, turmeric has also been shown to break down mucus in the airway, which helps relieve coughing and improve the ability to breathe (22).
6. Counteracts Stress
Chronic stress, both physical and psychological, can have a direct impact on the health of your immune system, slowly weakening your immunity and increasing your vulnerability to infections (23).
Stress can be stealthy, especially when it's chronic, as you often become slowly accustomed to the drain on your energy and well-being and start to feel that a stressed-out existence is just a standard way of life (24).
Although you can't necessarily remove all of your life stressors, you can certainly increase your resistance and tolerance to stress.
Stress can show up on your body in a number of ways, but two common side effects are increased inflammation and oxidation. As you've learned by now, turmeric is a superstar when it comes to combating both of these conditions (25).
In one study, researchers administered a curcumin supplement to mice and examined their response to stressors. The results showed that the mice given curcumin exhibited a 4.5-fold increase in stress resilience. In addition, the curcumin also seemed to prevent anxiety-like behavior in the defeated (stressed out) mice (26).
