Curry cures cancer

Sort of.

Scientists based at the Cork Cancer Research Centre in Ireland treated oesophageal cancer cells with curcumin – a chemical found in the curry spice tumeric.

They found that curcumin started to kill cancer cells within 24 hours. The cells also began to digest themselves, according to the research, published in the British Journal of Cancer.

I sure hope this turns out to be true, because I love curry. I wonder if the incidence of oesophageal cancer is lower in India than in, say, Switzerland.

God I love Google. A search on "esophageal cancer rate india" turned up a page that says:

Esophageal cancer is a relatively rare form of cancer, but some world areas have a markedly higher incidence than others: China, India and Japan, as well as the United Kingdom, appear to have a higher incidence, as well as the region around the Caspian Sea.

So my speculation was wrong. Again. It's a good thing I have a high threshold for embarrassment about being wrong.

Maybe it's because eating curry isn't the same as rubbing it on a cancer cell. I guess I should have said I hope eating curry turns out to work as well as rubbing curcumin on cancer cells in a lab dish, but apparently it doesn't. Or maybe the high rate in India is because so many people there smoke. Maybe if they didn't eat curry, they'd all be talking through tubes in their throats. I wish it weren't so complicated. That's the first rule of life: Everything is more complicated than you think.