Turmeric and curcumin do that as well, and also help regulate blood sugar and insulin.
Plus they are antibiotic, anti-parasitical, and anti-cancer.
Its also an antiinflammatory. I take it daily and really like it. For me it works like a half an ibuprofen.
My husband has started taking those.
From the link:
From the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry. In an article entitled "The Essential Medicinal Chemistry of Curcumin" Kathryn M. Nelson of the Department of Medicinal Chemistry, Institute for Therapeutics Discovery and Development at the University of Minnesota, and colleagues from two other universities, said "not so fast." It turns out that the quality of the "studies" done in support of the spice's benefits seem to be quite bland, but at least there were a lot of them.
The claims of medicinal benefits are derived from in vitro testing, which is just a notch above worthless for determining whether a test compound will become a drug for a given indication. In vitro assays are, at best, a guide for establishing whether a particular experimental compound is "hitting" the desired target, and whether it can penetrate cells. Even the most potent compounds from in vitro screens have only a remote possibility of becoming a drug. The journey from a tiny glass well to efficacy in human is almost endless. There are so many things that go wrong.
The list of flaws that the group found in turmeric research is both amazing and revealing. It is no wonder why the stuff is useless:
"[M]any researchers have described the potential “dark side of curcumin”: the drawbacks noted for curcumin include its poor pharmacokinetic/pharmacodynamic (PK/PD) properties, low efficacy in several disease models, and toxic effects under certain testing conditions."
"Web sites [have touted] the use of curcumin (and its primary commercial source, turmeric) as an anticancer agent, a therapeutic for Alzheimer’s disease, a treatment for hangovers, erectile dysfunction, baldness, hirsutism, fertility-boosting and contraceptive."
[Curcumin is like] a missile that has shown excellent promise in early testing (in vitro), even though this testing may have been bedeviled by design problems that led to several misfires. [Its] structure suggests that it might be unstable in a biological setting, and in fact, it is: both its in vitro and in vivo stabilities are abysmal [half-life of less than five minutes] relative to commercial drugs."
It is important, therefore, that any manuscript or research proposal that is based on the bioactivity [of curcumin] or its analogues addresses additional characteristics of this natural product: its chemical instability, poor ADME properties, potential toxicological effects, and its lack of success to date in the clinic."
And perhaps most important (emphasis mine)—Curcumin [belongs to a class of] compounds that have been observed to show activity in multiple types of assays by interfering with the assay readout rather than through specific compound/target interactions.