My all-time favorite dish is chicken cooked with turmeric. I like the chicken cooked with lots and lots of minced turmeric and shallots. My dad cooks one of the tastiest turmeric chicken and I can eat the entire plate of dish all by myself and yet not get fed up and still eat it the next day. I ate a lot of turmeric chicken during my 3 confinements.

Turmeric is a yellow, powdered spice that gives curry its distinctive color and flavor. Scientists believe that turmeric, which is used in most Indian meals, has an active ingredient that can help fight obesity.  A meal that includes turmeric will lead to less weight gain than one without the yellow root.

Turmeric contains a plant-based chemical called curcumin, which suppresses the growth of fat tissue in mice and human cell cultures, according to a study by Tufts University in Boston, published in the Journal of Nutrition.

Curcumin is also easily absorbed by the body, the researchers said, after experiments on mice.

“Weight gain is the result of the growth and expansion of fat tissue, which cannot happen unless new blood vessels form, a process known as angiogenesis,” said senior study author Mohsen Meydani of the Jean Mayer U.S. Department of Agriculture Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging at Tufts.

“Based on our data, curcumin appears to suppress angiogenic activity in the fat tissue of mice fed high fat diets,” he said in a statement.

Turmeric is effective when added to a high-fat meal, suggesting it could help fight obesity.

Researchers gave one set of mice high-fat diets and another set the same food with 500mg of curcumin added to each meal.

After 12 weeks, the mice which were fed curcumin weighed less than those which did not eat it.

Widely acknowledged to be a powerful antioxidant with anti-inflammatory properties, turmeric is currently under investigation in several studies to determine its use for cancer prevention and treatment.

So if you are lost for ideas on what to cook, go whip up a turmeric chicken dish.  There are several ways of cooking chicken with turmeric.  Chicken cooked with turmeric is delicious, wholesome, helps you to lose weight and may help prevent cancer too.