That turmeric in your pantry just might save you from breast cancer.

It’s a theory scientist Saraswati Sukumar hopes will gain traction.

Two years ago she began testing to see if curcumin, a substance in the Indian spice, had any impact on tumours in mice.

“The results showed that it did,” the researcher at Johns Hopkins University said. “The tumours just wouldn’t grow when the mice had had turmeric.”

She’s hoping her results will encourage oncologists to do curcumin trials of their own and ultimately offer it alongside mainstream cancer treatments such as chemotherapy.

The 69-year-old visited the island last month, to share her findings with doctors here.

“In India, turmeric is a traditional medicine for a range of ailments,” she said. “When I was a kid growing up in India my mother would rub turmeric on my cuts and scrapes.

“It was very common to see kids with bright yellow knees and elbows.”

She started looking into breast cancer 20 years ago and was surprised to find numerous papers touting the effects of her mother’s favourite remedy.

Surprised by the lack of clinical trials, she decided to run her own. The problem was, it was too expensive. She needed a huge pool of women and the testing had to be done over a long period of time.

Dr Sukumar decided to focus on animals instead.

She hopes the research will cut down on breast cancer reoccurrence and help alleviate such treatment side effects as early menopause, bone density loss and an increased risk of certain other cancers.

“There are some breast cancer preventive medicines for women with a high breast cancer risk, but they come with side effects, so we needed a very safe means of prevention,” she said. “Curcumin is completely harmless. It is not going to reduce the effects of the chemotherapy, if anything it will raise it.”

One of the reasons she’s investing so much of her time in the spice, is that it’s cheap. It’s already readily available in pill form, or as a spice.

She prefers the spice form.

“It’s not like curry, you don’t taste it so much,” she said. “But you can’t just drink it with water. If you did it would just float around in your stomach and not have much impact.

“In Indian cooking we usually start by putting it in hot oil. That helps to break it down.

“The unofficial use of turmeric is growing. I’d like for the oncologist to be able to tell patients to try it because it helps. Taxol, which was the ‘wonder drug’ discovered 15 years ago, comes from the bark of the yew tree, so our medications have relied on plant sources for years.

“Those have been accepted into the mainstream very well. It just takes people to get to know about it.”