What’s yellow, gathering dust in your cupboard, and almost certainly good for whatever ails you? No, it’s not custard powder (though I wouldn’t be surprised) – it’s our old friend turmeric, “the new kale” according to the Telegraph, “nature’s wonder drug” according to the Daily Mail, and quite simply “one of the most healing things around” as far as healthy eating celebrity Ella Mills is concerned.

Until recently, the most complicated thing about this familiar spice, as far as I was concerned, was its proper pronunciation. Agonised threads online are devoted to whether it should be ter-MERick or too-MERic (seriously, when it’s clearly TER-meric), but they largely date back to before newspapers declared it a wonder drug likely to protect against cancer, improve bone density, cure IBS, and help you “shed fat FAST”. As the stylish women’s website Refinery29 puts it, “2017 really is the year of turmeric”.

The hype

In short, turmeric has done a cauliflower – from also-ran to hip ingredient du jour, Google searches for it are up 75% in the last five years. “Get the glow” blogger Madeleine Shaw dubbed it “the king of spices” on the basis that “it is one of the highest antioxidant foods you can find, it’s super powerful and you only need a tiny bit” [sic], and the Hemsley sisters laud it for its “detoxifying, anti-inflammatory and antimicrobial” properties, all of which sound, as Mills puts it, “totally magical”. Natasha Corrett even goes as far as to claim in her book Honestly Healthy that, turmeric, her “number one favourite ingredient … may prevent the development of cancers”.

Amazingly, for something with such incredible powers, at under £1 a jar for the powdered stuff, this spice remains cheap, which can’t be said for all the supplements these wellness gurus recommend. So should we be hailing the world’s first good-value superfood?

The recipes

Turmeric doesn’t actually taste of very much – bitter, slightly warm (it’s a member of the same family as ginger). Its culinary popularity has more to do with its lovely colour, which new fans like to use in tonics, vegetable yoghurts (hang your head in shame Waitrose), and, one east London mole reports, sticky buns, the colour of the saffron variety, but considerably less pleasant to eat. The yellow stuff is most commonly found, however, in something called a turmeric latte, which appears to be an appropriated version of haldi doodh; a traditional pick-me-up from the Indian subcontinent prescribed for everything from a cold to weight loss (in Ayurvedic medicine, turmeric is held to be good for the immune system and digestion, as well as the joints and liver).

Mills’ warming turmeric tonic, in her second book, Deliciously Ella Every Day, is very simple: whisk turmeric into warm milk (she uses cashew, seduced by the “clean” mantra I go for oat, though afterwards I wonder why I didn’t just stick with cow) and sweeten with honey. Having read horror stories of childhoods marred by the force feeding of haldi doodh at the first sign of a sniffle, I’m surprised how pleasant it is, despite the slightly medicinal, subtly dusty flavour of the main attraction. I can’t help thinking it’s probably better playing a supporting role in more complex spicing, however – in a curry paste, for example, or in a masala blend.

The facts

So, turmeric tastes OK, and turns everything a very pretty colour, which is enough to guarantee it a place in my kitchen. But does it actually do any good? Is it a so-called “superfood”?)

Let’s take the various claims made for it one by one.

1) It’s an anti-inflammatory

This may sound like it’s only going to be useful if you’ve managed to twist your ankle, but in fact, research increasingly suggests a link between chronic inflammation and obesity, diabetes, heart disease and cancer. Though there is some evidence that supplements of curcumin, the yellow pigment that’s the active ingredient in turmeric, can reduce levels of the inflammatory proteins released by our cells, findings have so far been described by researchers as “modest” – according to Dr Gunveen Kaur, lecturer in nutritional sciences at Melbourne’s Deakin University “it’s unclear if [such supplements] would actually have a benefit in real life”.

Analysis of several studies suggests that curcumin supplements may provide a similar level of pain relief for arthritis sufferers as ibuprofen, but again, there is not yet enough data to come to a definite conclusion.

Verdict: Inconclusive

2) Diabetes and heart disease

Curcumin has been claimed to safeguard against insulin resistance and help to bring down high blood sugar levels. These headlines are, for the most part, prompted by animal trials; those in humans have thus far only shown a very negligible decrease in blood glucose. Similarly, there have not as yet been sufficient trials of the effects of curcumin on heart disease in humans to draw any meaningful conclusions.

Verdict: Inconclusive

3) Cancer

The Mail may have splashed on “the curry implant that can shrink breast tumours”, and though there have been a few, very small-scale studies showing encouraging results in cancer patients, there’s as yet little real evidence of curcumin’s ability to prevent, or halt the spread of cancers in human subjects.

Anthony Warner, of the marvellous One Angry Chef blog, writes: “I am no medical researcher, but I know for a fact that there are plenty of things that can kill cancer cells in a test tube. And I would also bet that many of these things are chemicals commonly found in foods. This does not mean that they can cure all cancers and, of course, turmeric (nor the curcumin contained within it) cannot either. If all we had to do to find a cure for disease was find out what killed cells in a test tube, we would have beaten cancer a long while back.”

Verdict: Inconclusive

None of this is to say the scientific community has dismissed turmeric as a lost cause. Curcumin falls into what science journal Nature calls the “chemical deceiver category” in that it’s “widely touted as having medicinal activity, but … gives false signals in drug screening tests”, which may explain the flurry of interest without much in the way of real results. It’s also pretty hard for the human body to absorb – though combining it with fats and piperine (found in black pepper) will help.

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How to buy it and where to use it

Although conventional western medicine hasn’t yet come up with any firm evidence to back up the big claims made for this bright little root, its flavour and colour are probably reason enough to keep it in your diet.

Arun Kapil of Ireland’s Green Saffron Spices explains that fresh turmeric should have “a gorgeous orange colour, it’s not yellow at all” – indeed, a deeper colour indicates a greater volatile oil content, and thus a better flavour. Interestingly there appears to be no benefit, from a curcumin point of view, in choosing fresh turmeric root over the dried powdered variety, though as they have a rather different flavour, some recipes will call for one rather than the other. (The root, which looks rather like a slender piece of fresh ginger, but with deeply orange flesh, can sometimes be found in larger supermarkets, and almost always in Asian grocers.)

If you’re not a fan of haldi doodh or its hipster equivalent, golden mylk, and you don’t fancy staining your blender forever by adding it to your morning smoothie, you might prefer turmeric in a savoury context – in a yellow kedgeree, southern-style Thai curry, as part of a spice rub for fish, meat or vegetables (it’s particularly good with its trendy mate, roasted cauliflower) or stirred into soups or scrambled eggs. Whatever you make, if you’re eating it in the hope of as yet undiscovered health benefits then always combine it with black pepper, and a fat of some sort, to maximise the curcumin absorption.

Is turmeric the magic bullet it’s been claimed to be? Of course not. Might it be beneficial in some way to our health? Very probably – we’ll just have to wait and see. In the meantime, however, it does make a rather delicious looking curry.