Curcumin also has a strong effect on blocking glutamate. I've been taking it for 3 months, and to my astonishment, NO MORE MIGRAINES. And I've been suffering from severe ones for decades. Curcumin has other effects such as thinning the blood (I had thick blood) and it probably helped them in that respect too. But when I heard it could help migraines I really was not expecting them to *entirely* go away.

No doubt it helped that I had done some mercury detox first, a few months of NCD, which had helped decrease my migraines to about 6 a month, which was still costing around $150 a months since migraine meds are 25 bucks apiece. GAH.

I'm sure now that I've had an MSG sensitivity I wasn't aware of. After I found a list of all the things in food that MSG is hidden as, I was definitely eating it every day. Even as someone who does 90% of my own cooking from scratch!

Here's part of an interview about excitotoxins with Russell Blaylock that mentions Curcumin:

http://www.newstarget.com/020550.html

Mike: Here's a practical question that's actually been burning in my head for about eight years: Is there anything that a person can take to block the absorption of MSG or glutamate as a defensive supplement?

Dr. Blaylock: Well, not necessarily to block it. You have other amino acids that can't compete for glutamic acid absorption. So that may be one way to help reduce the rate at which it would be absorbed.

Mike: Which aminos would those be?

Dr. Blaylock: Those would include leucine, isoleucine and lysine. They would compete for the same carrier system, so that would slow down absorption. There are a lot of things that act as glutamate blockers. You know, like silimarin, curcumin and ginkgo biloba. These things are known to directly block glutamate receptors and reduce excitotoxicity. Curcumin is very potent. Most of your flavonoids.

Magnesium is particularly important, because magnesium can block the MNDA glutamate type receptor. That's its natural function, so it significantly reduces toxicity. Vitamin E succinate is powerful at inhibiting excitotoxicity, as are all of your antioxidants. They found combinations of B vitamins also block excitotoxicity.