04/09/2026
Yesss 👏🏻👏🏻 so tired of hearing that you had to feed it with black pepper!! It’s still effective even without it. As someone who takes turmeric religiously for chronic pain, I can attest to this! It still works amazingly 💛
Turmeric - is black pepper necessary?
Turmeric is widely touted to be a magical cure for just about anything (which is possibly stretching it, but evidence suggests that it has a remarkable number of potential biological effects, at least in rodents and humans), but only if you use it in a particular way.
Fans of the golden spice insist that it must be mixed with a fat source (coconut oil is the fave), and *freshly cracked* black pepper.
When feeding horses, this is not always terribly practical - so is it necessary? And why do people say this?
When researching turmeric for my Master's project, I learnt that curcumin (the major bioactive ingredient) is very poorly absorbed - to the point that many wonder how is can have an effect in the body at all. So various things have been tried to try and increase blood levels of curcumin.
From my final thesis 2016 -
"Absorption is another complex issue regarding the use of turmeric. Curcumin is widely acknowledged to be very poorly absorbed and rapidly metabolised, resulting in extremely low plasma concentrations (Anand et al., 2007). Whilst equine pharmacokinetic data is not available for turmeric or any of its constituents, horses would be expected to have a similar pattern, with possibly more rapid hepatic metabolism (herbivorous).
Popular advice regarding turmeric supplementation suggests a fat source be fed alongside the turmeric, as well as mixing it with pepper. As turmeric is hydrophobic, but lipid-soluble, absorption from the digestive tract is improved with a lipophilic vehicle (Shishu & Maheshwari, 2010), and piperine (a component in black pepper) has been shown to slow the metabolic process sufficient to allow an increase in bioavailability of curcumin 2- to 3-fold (Shoba et al., 1998).
In this study, a fat source (powdered coconut oil) was included in the daily meal, however as the use of pepper has not been studied in horses, it was not used to avoid introducing confounding factors in the trial."
So we chose NOT to use pepper in the trial, as it may have had its own effects on the horses - and guess what?
IT STILL WORKED!
While I don't know whether it may have worked *better* with the pepper, I'm guessing the effect would be minimal. Turmeric's efficacy is not solely based on curcumin - it contains 100s of components that may work in synergy with each other to create the results we.
Additionally, in the case of gastric ulcers which I was studying - the turmeric may have actually had a topical effect by physically coating the ulcers and acting that way.
Take home message - if getting your chef's pepper grinder out every day is stopping you from feeding turmeric, don't stress - just add the turmeric (quality IS important though) and make sure there is some sort of fat source in the feed (flaxseed, a dollop of whatever oil you may feed, it doens't matter) - and Bob's your uncle!
