Picture of regular store-bought turmeric powder. Dull-yellow or brown-orange color, indicating the powder has been exposed to air for a long time. This type of turmeric is only suitable as a food-coloring agent and not as a supplement.

The bright and lovely color of fresh, unoxidized turmeric root. It’s almost glowing, due to curcumin’s ability to convert UV light to yellow. 

Bad News: Regular, Store-Bought Turmeric Has Very Poor Gut Absorption. Most of It Is Oxidized and Only Suitable for Food Coloring

We have all heard that turmeric is great – it promotes radiant skin, weight loss, has many cognitive and brain benefits and can work better for pain than over the counter pain relievers! Recently, some publications explored the effectiveness of turmeric for depression and the results were very promising.
Virtually all benefit-showing studies done on turmeric, use ethanol-aqueous extracts from fresh roots. This is very different from regular, store-bought turmeric. Gut absorption of turmeric is quite low (study) and gets even lower with age, because of the reduced ability of the liver to produce bile.
Fortunately, there are ways around this! Let’s explore some great options to get all the benefits of turmeric, without having access to lab-grade turmeric extracts.

Best Option: Use Full-Range Micelle Turmeric to Get All The Health Benefits Turmeric is Known For! (Link)

This is arguably the most effective way to put turmeric in your body and actually feel, notice and experience the actual benefits turmeric is known for. Micelle turmeric uses extremely tiny droplets(about 200 times smaller than the emulsion droplets that butter consists of for example), suspended in a liquid to bypass the digestive process and ‘transport’ the turmeric straight into your cells, where it can do it’s magic – it’s the closest thing to an ‘anti-aging injection’ that you’ll find. Even compared to high-quality unoxidized turmeric extract, micelle turmeric has up to 200-times higher absorption rate and quickly gets delivered around the cells in the body.
As amazing as micelle liposomal turmeric is, it does have a slight downside – its higher price. Since making micelle solutions requires lab testing to confirm that particle size is small enough to get absorbed right through membranes, this does raise the cost slightly.
Micelle turmeric is ingested normally(orally) – because of it’s high concentration and bio-availability, only a few drops are required to experience the effects.

Option 2: Find Fresh Turmeric Root, Blend With Some Water and Coconut oil, and Add Black Pepper

The second best way to absorb turmeric is to simply get a high-quality powder or just fresh root. It’s impossible to tell with a 100% certainty how good certain turmeric powder is, without lab testing, but the color of the powder is a good indication – look for a bright, vibrant orange or yellow color. Low quality turmeric is immediately obvious by it’s ‘dullness’ – it just doesn’t look that good. If you find a high-quality powder, you can use that to make turmeric milk(recipe), which has decent absorption, due to the fat content of the milk.

There are three basic fundamentals, which lie at the base of all health and longevity. Surely, a large part of your health is genetics. In fact, genetics make up more than 60% of what will happen to you health-wise. However, the remaining percentage depends on your eating habits, stress and other factors. Let’s explore them:
Eliminating harmful habits/exposure to toxins
No amount of healthy eating can balance a bad habit like smoking for example – it depletes Vitamin C from the body at a rate, which cannot be kept up with. However, there are harmful substances everywhere and at not so obvious places. For example, if you live in an older home, you can have a variety of  general and unspecific symptoms, all related to exposure to mold spores. The common mold Aspergillus for example is found in most homes, where the humidity levels are high. It’s spores can cause a variety of health problems, including difficulty breathing, poor concentration and much more. Most mold spores are carcinogenic also and therefore – you should do your best to avoid exposure to them.
Exercise
Almost all healthy people who live long and happy lives have one thing in common – they exercise. This may not be the obvious type of exercise, like going to the gym. They might just be an active person overall, and use less transportation, substituting it for walking. Exercise keeps your circulatory system in check, and we know that circulatory and heart conditions sit at the top of death causes. It’s not necessary to be extreme – a 20 minute run several times per week will put you way ahead of most people. Make sure to exercise away from big roads or other polluted areas as this may do you more harm than good – we will talk about this in other articles as well.
Diet
Your diet is more important than most people think. Switching to a good diet may take some time in order to see tangible results, which is why many people disregard the effectiveness of a healthy diet. You don’t have be extreme when it comes to your diet also – excluding soft drinks, bread and MSG-ridden meats from your diet will put you way ahead of most people and you will avoid some of the most obviously harmful toxins. In addition to that, I always recommend taking a good quality multivitamin and fish oil – achieving a 100% RDI of most vitamins is very hard through diet alone. The same applies to fish oil.

Fish oil is one of the most well-researched supplements and has many functions in the body. Unfortunately, it is now losing it’s popularity and people are starting to look for the new and shiny thing, ignoring the fundamentals, like this one. If you are serious about your health, taking fish oil is one of the best things you can do.
Recently, the frightening theory that fish oil may increase prostate cancer risk in men has been discussed on various forums. This came as a result from a research, published on PubMed, which stated that men with higher concentrations of omega-3 fatty acids in their bloodstream seemed to have higher risk for developing prostate cancer. The first obvious flaw here is that blood levels of omega-3 fatty acids are not necessarily correlated with higher omega-3 diet intake. In fact, the reverse seems to be the case. I’m not going to make this post all about this research, as there are plenty of people out there who have already debunked this myth. Intake of omega-3 fatty acids will not increase your risk for any type of cancer. Period.
I personally began taking fish oil a little over a year ago. After the first month, I really did start to see certain health benefits, especially improved joint health. The results from any fatty acid supplementation come so slowly that it can be easy not to notice them. It’s the same process, by which people get unhealthy and overweight – the change happens so slowly, that you don’t realize it. Meanwhile, if you woke up one day and you were suddenly 30 pounds overweight you would probably freak out.
This is the first important point – fish oil works SLOWLY. But it does work .I’ve noticed better mood, lack of mood swings, better looking skin (which my wife commented on) and most of all – lack of joint pain and about 3 times more joint mobility. Apparently, fish oil acts as a ‘lubricant’ on your joints, which is why it works so well for arthritis, as several studies have pointed out. This was enough to convince me to keep taking it and I’ve never known anyone who has experienced anything but good results from taking omega-3.
Just make sure to take a quality product with a high EPA/DHA content, which is what actually counts.