 Multiple myeloma is one of the most dreaded cancers. It's a cancer of our antibody-producing plasma cells, considered one of the most intractable blood diseases for many years. The precursor disease is called monoclonal gamopathy of undetermined significance, or MGUS. When it was named, its significance was undetermined, but now we know the multiple myeloma is almost always preceded by MGUS, which makes it one of the most common pre-malignant disorders with a prevalence of about 3% in the older white general population, about 2 to 3 times that in African-American populations. MGUS itself is asymptomatic. You don't even know you have it until your doctor finds it incidentally doing routine blood work. But should it progress to multiple myeloma, you then have about four years to live. So we need to find ways to treat MGUS early, before it turns into cancer, but no such treatment exists. Rather, patients are just kind of placed in a holding pattern with frequent checkups. But all you're going to do is watch and wait, minus well try out some dietary changes. The potential role of curcuma, the yellow pigment in the spiced turmeric, in patients with MGUS. Why curcuma? Well, it's relatively safe, considering it's been consumed as a dietary spice for centuries, and it kills multiple myeloma cells. Here's the unimpeded growth of four different cell lines of multiple myeloma. You start out with 5,000 cancer cells at the beginning of the week, which then doubles, triples, quadruples, in a matter of days. But if you add a little bit of curcuma, or a lot of curcuma, the growth is stunted or stopped. But this is in a petri dish. Still, exciting enough to justify trying it out in a clinical trial, and six years later, researchers did. One can measure the progression of the disease by the rise in blood levels of what's called paraprotein, which is what's made by MGUS and myeloma cells. About one in three of the patients responded to the curcuma with dropping paraprotein levels, whereas there was no response in the placebo group. These positive findings prompted them to commence a double-blind, randomized, controlled trial, and here it is. And they saw the same kind of positive biomarker response in both MGUS patients, as well as those with so-called smoldering multiple myeloma in an early stage of the disease. These findings suggest that curcumin might have the potential to slow the disease process in patients, delaying or preventing the progression of MGUS to multiple myeloma, but we won't know until longer, larger studies are done. The best way to deal with multiple myeloma is to not get it in the first place. In 2010, I profiled this study, suggesting that vegetarians have just a quarter of the risk of multiple myeloma compared to those who eat meat. Even just working with chicken meat may double one's risk of multiple myeloma. The thinking being that cancers like leukemias, lymphomas, myeloma may be induced by viral agents in both cattle and chicken, so-called zoonotic or animal-to-human oncogenic cancer-causing viruses. Beef, however, was not associated with multiple myeloma. There are, however, some vegetarian foods we may want to avoid. Harvard reported a controversial link between diet soda and multiple myeloma, implicating aspartame. French fries and potato chips should not be the way we get our vegetables, nor should we probably pickle them. While the intake of shallots and garlic and soy foods and green tea was associated with significantly reduced risk of multiple myeloma, an intake of pickled vegetables three times a week or more was associated with increased risk.