My Detailed Primal Force Curcumin Triple Burn Review

by Greg Simon
Updated on May 29, 2023

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Curcumin Triple Burn is a turmeric-based product made by Primal Force, a nutritional supplement company owned by Dr. Al Sears who is an anti-aging physician based in Royal Palm Beach, Florida.

And in this Triple Burn review article I will share my evaluation of Curcumin Triple Burn with you, and we’ll be taking a detailed look at a number of its key features along the way.

Bottom line: Is Primal Force Curcumin Triple Burn worth it? Probably not, since there are better turmeric curcumin supplements on the market than this one, some for less money.

Table of Contents show

How to find an effective turmeric supplement

Case in point: I spent 18 months researching curcumin’s healing properties in published clinical trials at the U.S. Library of Medicine. I also product-tested a dozen turmeric supplements over that time, & analyzed the ingredients of 20-30 more.

After all that, my wife (the clinical research expert in the family) & I both agreed that:

most turmeric/curcumin supplements on the market don’t do a (noticeable) thing;
the brand we both experienced tangible benefit from was CurcuminMD Plus.

So we’ve been buying that for a year & a half now. I share that experience in an in-depth review of it in this article if you’re interested in it: A Detailed Review of CurcuminMD Plus By A Longtime Customer.

Primal Force Curcumin review topics

Supplement Facts
Ingredients
Dosage strength vs. research
Monthly cost
Company profile
Certifications & manufacturing quality
Triple Burn reviews

Science resources included

As is my custom here on heydayDo, I will provide links to all of the relevant sports science & medical resources, clinical studies, and nutritional data used in this article.

Curcumin Triple Burn Review

A note about Primal Force Triple Burn

Before we get crackin’, I wanted to pass this along…

I notice that several people go to Amazon to look for & presumably buy Curcumin Triple Burn, but just know that it’s not available for purchase there.

In fact, no Primal Force supplements are sold on Amazon.

I can’t say I did an exhaustive internet search — but I did poke around a bit — and it appears to me that the only place you can get Curcumin Triple Burn or other Primal Force products is on the Primal Force website, PrimalForce.net.

What’s next

Like most of my product reviews here on heydayDo, the topic flow of the article will probably be in the order of the outline I listed above.

Ok, let’s get a handle on what’s in Curcumin Triple Burn, starting with a peek at the Supplement Facts label that’s on the bottle.

Supplement Facts

So we see that the 60-count bottle — which is the only size it comes in — will last a month if we stick to the two capsules per day serving size that’s listed on the label.

Primal Force’s ingredients

Curcumin Triple Burn’s formula is built with five herbs, three in raw powder form and two in extracts that have been dried.

All of those ingredients are natural herbs that are commonly promoted as offering numerous health benefits; scientific research supports some claims, other not so much.

I’ll go over these in detail in a sec, but wanted to cover the less important Other Ingredients first.

Gelatin

The capsule the ingredients come in is made of gelatin, which means this is not a vegan product in case you were interested.

The gelatin used to make “Gel caps” like these come from bovine (beef) or porcine (pork) byproducts — usually collagen from the hides & bones. (1)

Rice flour

A lot of supplements have active ingredients in them that actually take up very little weight or space, for example the ingredients used in Primal Force’s Triple Burn.

As a result, manufacturers use fillers so that the teeny bits of active ingredients can be packaged in an easy-to-use capsule or tablet. (2)

Rice flour is the filler of choice here in Curcumin Triple Burn.

But at least it’s a natural filler, as opposed to some lab-concocted synthetic chemical.

Magnesium stearate

Speaking of synthetic chemicals, this might sound like one but it’s actually made up of two very common natural ingredients found on Earth: magnesium & stearic acid.

(You might also have seen stearic acid listed in the “Other Ingredients” sections of Supplement Facts labels before, as it’s pretty common.)

Magnesium’s a common mineral, it’s even in our bones, and stearic acid is a type of fat found in most animals, as well as things like olive oil and cocoa butter. (3)

Magnesium stearate — like its close cousin stearic acid — is used as a lubricant during the manufacturing & filling of the supplement capsules. (4)

Without it, the main ingredients might clump together instead of being distributed uniformly in their batch…or they might stick to the machinery.

What’s not in Primal Force Curcumin

We can see in the fine print that Primal Force is letting us know that Curcumin Triple Burn does not have any:

sugar
salt
wheat
yeast
gluten
corn
soy
preservatives
artificial colors
artificial flavors

Alrighty then, onto the main ingredients in Triple Burn.

If we decide to add Curcumin Triple Burn to our diet, these are the things that are supposed to deliver the “healthier and better lifestyle” that supplement makers promise.

Turmeric root powder

Dose: 1000 mg

An orange-yellow powdered spice that has been around for hundreds of years, turmeric comes from the Curcuma Longa plant, which is in the ginger family. (5)

In the left part of the picture above you can see its rhizomes, which are the underground stems that get harvested, dried, & ground up into the brightly colored powder we know.

Inside the turmeric is curcumin, a type of polyphenol, meaning it’s a micronutrient that contains bioactive properties that can deliver us some nice health benefits.

Absorption & other issues

However, our body does a very bad job at absorbing the beneficial compounds in curcumin; it tends to flush it out before it can get into our bloodstream and go to work. (6)

And it is very important to note that turmeric powder only contains around 3% curcumin, and that’s why curcumin extracts that are standardized to a concentration of 95% are much preferred over turmeric powder.

Unfortunately, Curcumin Triple Burn uses plain turmeric powder, and I will get into this issue more in the Dosage vs. Science Research section.

Ginger root extract

Dose: 100 mg

I think you can easily see from the picture above how closely the ginger and turmeric plants are related, just by their similar-looking rhizomes.

Ginger is another plant that has been used in food & medicine since ancient times and like turmeric, the health benefits are found in its rhizomes. (7)

On the Supplement Facts label, note that Curcumin Triple Burn is using a ginger extract versus plain powder, and this is done to concentrate the amount of beneficial compounds found in ginger — the most important one is (perhaps unsurprisingly) known as gingerol.

We see that the dose of the extract is 100 mg, but we do not know to what percent the concentration has been standardized to, whether, 5%, 10%, or whatever.

The common industry practice is such that when an extract is used, the supplement maker will show you the percent of concentration to which it was standardized, like so:

(1MD’s CurcuminMD Plus displaying its Boswellia extract @ 65% concentration, and Vitacost’s Root2 Curcumin showing us its 95% curcuminoid concentration.)

There is no additional nutritional information provided on the Primal Force website for Curcumin Triple Burn beyond what we get on the Supplement Facts label.

Also, there is no standard “standardization” percent with ginger extracts, and research reviews such as this one here have shown that the amount of gingerols in supplements varies quite a bit…so no educated guess option for us either.

It’s too bad we don’t know how potent the extract is, but we’ll look at the existing clinical results of ginger supplementation down in the Dosage vs. Science Research section anyway.

Holy basil

Dose: 100 mg

The third herbal ingredient in our Curcumin Triple Burn has a familiar name, and is indeed in the same family as the sweet basil leaves we’re used to sprinkling in pasta sauce or eating fresh with mozzarella & tomatoes in a Caprese salad.

This Holy basil plant (aka Ocimum sanctum or Ocimum tenuiflorum, or Tulsi in Ayurveda) is used in cooking, but is perhaps best known for its many health applications.

It is available in extract or powder form, with the extracts obviously packing a more potent dose in an effort to more closely match the doses used in effective clinical trials.

Galangal root powder

Dose: 100 mg

The Galangal plant is not in the ginger family, but it is related to it and shares several things in common with ginger & turmeric.

For one, the underground stems known as rhizomes are used in a similar way like those from the turmeric & ginger plant are: dried, ground up, and taken for healing purposes.

Their compounds are also considered polyphenols, those micronutrients that have bioactive and potentially antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties to them. (8)

In fact, there’s enough of an overlap with the better-studied effects of turmeric & ginger that I kind of wonder why it’s included in Curcumin Triple Burn.

Also — the health-related uses I saw Galangal applied to in Eastern medicine practice focused on specific & acute health problems, not really like a daily life-boosting tonic that curcumin & ginger are well-suited for.

In the Dosage vs. Science Research section, I’ll share the reasons some medical experts give for their skeptical opinions on Galangal’s effectiveness.

BioPerine®

Dose: 5 mg

Our last ingredient in Primal Force’s Curcumin Triple Burn is not included to provide any direct health benefit to us, but we definitely benefit in an indirect way thanks to its presence.

If you’re not familiar with it, BioPerine® is a patented extract form of piperine, which is the bioactive compound in black pepper.

(My photo above is of a Piper Nigrum, the black pepper tree.)

Piperine helps our bodies absorb curcumin

And it turns out that piperine is able to improve the absorption of other beneficial compounds, like the curcumin in turmeric. (9)

I believe that as of now, BioPerine® is the only patented 95% black pepper extract on the market. (10)

And if it’s not, then it’s certainly the brand most used by supplement companies looking to increase the value of their turmeric product in the eyes of savvy curcumin shoppers…like you ‘n me. 😉

BioPerine has a lot of research behind it proving its absorption-enhancing effects on nutrients besides curcumin, including beta-carotene, CoQ10, iron, resveratrol, selenium, & vitamin B6. (11)

No doubt, BioPerine is in Curcumin Triple Burn to enhance the aborption of the curcumin that’s in the turmeric powder.

Too bad there’s so little curcumin to begin with, but that’s another story we’ll talk about later.

But I bet BioPerine’s presence boosts the bioavailability of the active compounds found in the other herbal ingredients as well.

Curcumin Triple Burn monthly cost

Note: online prices change constantly these days, the numbers I’m quoting today may be different when you check them out…

As mentioned earlier, the Primal Force website looks like it’s the only spot where they sell their supplements, and here’s the link for Triple Burn:

Curcumin Triple Burn product page

It comes in one quantity, a 60-count bottle that lasts a month since the daily serving size is two capsules.

Today I see three price tiers, and I’ll line them up by monthly cost:

A single bottle for $43 + $9 shipping = $52 /month;

Three bottles for $116 + $11 shipping = $127 ÷ 3 = $42 /month;

A “Subscribe & Save” deal that’s three bottles (shipped every three months) for $90 with free shipping = $30 /month.

Is $30 a month a good price?

Since Curcumin Triple Burn is a product with a unique recipe, there aren’t any pre-made formulas similar to it on the market that I can compare it to if we want to see if it’s a good deal or not.

Even so, I can still create a comparison for Curcumin Triple Burn by tracking down its ingredients separately, since all five of them are available individually.

Then I’ll do cost calculations using the same dosage as Primal Force does in their Curcumin Triple Burn.

Note that the doses are very small amounts of powder, so if you haven’t worked with milligram dosing using bulk ingredients, you’ll need a spoon & scale setup like mine:

The milligram scale I use is the Weigh Gram Digital Pocket Scale, (around 11 bucks) and the plastic 1/32 spoon comes in a pack of 24 for $9 — the Cornucopia Mini Scoops 150 mg.

Here are the products I chose:

Starwest Botanicals Turmeric Powder

BulkSupplements Ginger Extract

Nova Nutritions Organic Holy Basil

Naturevibe Botanicals Organic Galangal Root

Prescribed for Life Piperine Powder

Simple math

I just used basic math to see how much each one of these — in the dosage supplied by Curcumin Triple Burn — would cost me if I bought the above-listed products and measured them out every day.

Look at the doses in Curcumin Triple Burn:

Turmeric powder 1000 mg (1 gram)
Ginger root extract 100 mg
Holy basil powder 100 mg
Galangal powder 100 mg
Bioperine/piperine 5 mg

* There are 28 grams to an ounce, & of course 16 oz. to a lb., so rounding comes out to 450 grams in a lb.

* 100 mg is 1/10 of a gram.

Taking the organic turmeric powder I selected as an example:

Cost & weight: $7 for 1 lb.

$7 ÷ 450 = 2¢ per gram (the 1000 mg daily dose)

Bottom line on Curcumin Triple Burn cost:

I did the above exercise for all five ingredients, and adding them together I could recreate the Curcumin Triple Burn recipe at a cost of 8¢ a day.

Over a 30-day month that comes out to $2.40.

A month of Curcumin Triple Burn costs from $30 to $52.

$2.40 vs. $30-$52.

😉

Curcumin Triple Burn dosage vs. research

In this section I will compare the doses used in Primal Force’s curcumin product with the doses used in human clinical trials that demonstrated some level of benefit.

For me this is a big deal, because in my non-scientific, non-medical, & somewhat jaded opinion — a supplement beating down cancer cells in a test tube or inflammation markers in a mouse isn’t the same as it reducing the amount of pain & stiffness in my knee while I’m doing sets of squats on leg day.

In other words, is there proof that the supplement works on a person like me?

And if there is evidence, then what was the dosage used when the supplemented delivered a particular health benefit to a live human being?

So I spend time in our U.S. National Library of Medicine database at PubMed, researching the existing published research on any health or fitness supplement that’s relevant to me…like turmeric curcumin f’rinstance.

There are facts, and then there’s Twitter & Instagram noise and supplement marketing hype from profiteering manufacturers.

Turmeric powder

Curcumin Triple Burn turmeric powder dose:

1000 mg, which equals approximately 30 mg of curcuminª.

Effective clinical doses of curcumin, not turmeric:

500 mg†† – 1500 mg**

References

ª – As a reminder, plain turmeric powder contains very little curcumin in it — just 3% or so — and it is the curcumin that can provide health benefits to us, not the turmeric powder itself.

†† – The 500 mg on the low end of effective clinical doses of curcumin was using an enhanced-absorption formula known as BCM-95®, but most effective doses were higher. (12)

** – Doses used for various health conditions range from 1000 mg – 1500 mg of curcumin in this Healthline list here. (13)

Bottom line:

30 mg is a long way from clinically-effective doses of curcumin that go from 500 mg – 1500 mg.