“Alzheimer’s disease is an irreversible, progressive brain disorder that slowly destroys memory and thinking skills, and eventually the ability to carry out the simplest tasks. In most people with Alzheimer’s, symptoms first appear in their mid-60s. Estimates vary, but experts suggest that more than 5.5 million Americans may have Alzheimer’s.”
NIH National Institute of Aging (https://www.nia.nih.gov/)
Alzheimer’s Might be “Brain Diabetes”
It’s becoming increasingly clear that the same pathological process that leads to insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes may also hold true for your brain. As you over-indulge on sugar and grains, your brain becomes overwhelmed by the consistently high levels of insulin and eventually shuts down its insulin signaling, leading to impairments in your thinking and memory abilities, and eventually causing permanent brain damage.
Regularly consuming more than 25 grams of fructose per day will dramatically increase your risk of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. Consuming too much fructose will inevitably wreak havoc on your body’s ability to regulate proper insulin levels.
Although fructose is relatively “low glycemic” on the front end, it reduces the affinity for insulin for its receptor leading to chronic insulin resistance and elevated blood sugar on the back end. So, while you may not notice a steep increase in blood sugar immediately following fructose consumption, it is likely changing your entire endocrine system’s ability to function properly behind the scenes.
Additionally, fructose has other modes of neurotoxicity, including causing damage to the circulatory system upon which the health of your nervous system depends, as well as profoundly changing your brain’s craving mechanism, often resulting in excessive hunger and subsequent consumption of additional empty carbohydrate-based calories.
In one study from UCLA, researchers found that rats fed a fructose-rich and omega-3 fat deficient diet (similar to what is consumed by many Americans) developed both insulin resistance and impaired brain function in just six weeks.
Plus, when your liver is busy processing fructose (which your liver turns into fat), it severely hampers its ability to make cholesterol, an essential building block of your brain crucial to its health. This is yet another important facet that explains how and why excessive fructose consumption is so detrimental to your health. Decreasing fructose intake is one of the most important moves you can take in decreasing the risk of Alzheimer’s disease in your lifetime.
Tips for avoiding Alzheimer’s Disease is Part 2 tomorrow. 😉
More Tips for Avoiding Alzheimer’s Disease
The beauty of following a healthy diet is that it helps treat and prevent all chronic degenerative diseases, from the common ones like heart disease, cancer, diabetes, obesity and Alzheimer’s to the ones you have never heard of or can’t even pronounce.
The first step is to eat healthy, maintaining exercise balanced with rest and practice healthy habits in addressing Alzheimer’s disease, which is currently at epidemic proportions, with 5.4 million Americans – including one in eight people aged 65 and over – living with the disease.7 By 2050, this is expected to jump to 16 million, and in the next 20 years it is projected that Alzheimer’s will affect one in four Americans. People we need to live healthier if not to help ourselves our future young ones.
In spite of how common memory loss is among Westerners, it is NOT a “normal” part of aging. While even mild “senior moments” may be caused by the same brain lesions associated with Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia, these cognitive changes are by no means inevitable! People who experience very little decline in their cognitive function up until their deaths have been found (post-mortem) to be free of brain lesions, showing that it’s entirely possible to prevent the damage from occurring in the first place and one of the best ways to do this is by leading a healthy lifestyle.
“Scientists don’t yet fully understand what causes Alzheimer’s disease in most people. There is a genetic component to some cases of early-onset Alzheimer’s disease. Late-onset Alzheimer’s arises from a complex series of brain changes that occur over decades. The causes probably include a combination of genetic, environmental, and lifestyle factors. The importance of any one of these factors in increasing or decreasing the risk of developing Alzheimer’s may differ from person to person.”
NIH National Institute on Aging (https://www.nia.nih.gov)
At one time Alzheimer’s disease was a disease considered with unknown etiology (or cause). Today it is considered different in the eyes of many in the medical profession. By a Dr. Mercola a physician who founded Mercola.com (Mercola.com is now the world’s top natural health resource site, with over 1.5 million subscribers.) feels this about alzeiher’s disease:
“The cause of the debilitating, and fatal, brain disease Alzheimer’s is conventionally said to be a mystery.
While we know that certain diseases, like type 2 diabetes, are definitively connected to the foods you eat, Alzheimer’s is generally thought to strike without warning or reason.
That is, until recently.
Now, a growing body of research suggests there may be a powerful connection between the foods you eat and your risk of Alzheimer’s disease and dementia, via similar pathways that cause type 2 diabetes. Some have even re-named Alzheimer’s as “type 3 diabetes.””
In a recent animal study, researchers from Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island were able to induce many of the characteristic brain changes seen with Alzheimer’s disease (disorientation, confusion, inability to learn and remember) by interfering with insulin signaling in their brains.
Know that faulty insulin (and leptin, another hormone) signaling is an underlying cause for insulin resistance, which, of course, typically leads to type 2 diabetes. However, while insulin is usually associated with its role in keeping your blood sugar levels in a healthy range, it also plays a role in brain signaling. When researchers disrupted the proper signaling of insulin in the brain, it resulted in dementia.
What does this have to do with your diet? Let us go back to one of my articles on diabetes and how it impacts your diet. It states “The foods we eat that contain starches, carbohydrates, calories are made up of sugar. When food reaches our stomach in time digestion starts to take place where these foods are broken down in the stomach into individual or complex sugar molecules ( glucose being one of the most common and important ones). The glucose then passes from our stomach into our bloodstream when it reaches the liver 60 to 80 % of the glucose gets stored in that organ turning glucose into inactive glucose that’s converted to glycogen. The purpose for glycogen is when our glucose is low and our body needing energy we have this extra stored sugar, glycogen, to rely on. This is done by the liver which allows the sugar to be stored and released back into the bloodstream if we need it=energy, since nothing is in our stomach at that time, in that case scenario). When glucose=an active sugar, it is our energy for our cells and tissues and is a sugar ready to be utilized by the body where it is needed, by many organs. Think of a car for one moment, and what makes it run? That would be gas/fuel for it to function. The same principle with glucose in your bloodstream=fuel for the human body so we can function, for without it we wouldn’t survive. That is the problem with a person that has diabetes. They eat, they break the food down, the glucose gets in the blood but the glucose fuel can’t be used due to lack of or NO insulin at all. Insulin allows glucose to pass into our cells and tissues to be used as energy/fuel for the body parts to work. Glucose is used as the principle source of energy (It is used by the brain for energy, the muscles for both energy and some storage.) The liver one function is for glucose storage=that is where glucose is converted to glycogen, and even stored in fat tissue using it for triglyceride production). But remember the size of the liver and like a gas tank it stops filling up when full; so if you eat alot in sugar the liver can convert extra sugar not needed for tissues and cells to glycogen for so long. When the liver has no more room the extra glucose in the bloodstream gets stored elsewhere; it than goes in our fat tissue. If this is done repeatedly day after day that is how you become obese; but that is another all by itself. Glucose does get sent to other organs for more storage, as well as other body parts making insulin, being the Brain. Insulin plays that vital role in allowing glucose to be distributed throughout the body.
The origin of insulin in the brain has been explained from peripheral (outside) or central sources, or both. Regardless of whether insulin is of peripheral origin or produced in the brain, this hormone may act through its own receptors present in the brain. The molecular events through which insulin functions in the brain are the same as those operating in the periphery.
This new focus on the Alzheimer’s/Diabetes/Insulin connection follows a growing recognition of insulin’s role in the brain. Until recently, the hormone was typecast as a regulator of blood sugar, giving the cue for muscles, liver and fat cells to extract sugar from the blood and either use it for energy or store it as fat. We now know that it is also a master multi-tasker: it helps neurons, particularly in the hippocampus and frontal lobe, take up glucose for energy, and it also regulates neurotransmitters, like acetylcholine, which are crucial for memory and learning.” What is effected with Alzheimer’s disease? Your memory and learning, So your diet plays a big role in Alzheimer’s disease.
Over-consumption of sugars and grains is what ultimately causes your body to be incapable of “hearing” the proper signals from insulin and leptin, leaving you insulin resistant in both body and brain. Alzheimer’s disease was tentatively dubbed “type 3 diabetes” in early 2005 when researchers learned that the pancreas is not the only organ that produces insulin. Your brain also produces insulin, and this brain insulin is necessary for the survival of your brain cells. Remember insulin allows glucose to pass inside cells which gives energy, being the glucose, for the cells to do their jobs.
If You Have Diabetes, Your Risk of Alzheimer’s Increases Dramatically.
Diabetes is linked to a 65 percent increased risk of developing Alzheimer’s, which may be due, in part, because insulin resistance and/or diabetes appear to accelerate the development of plaque in your brain, which is a hallmark of Alzheimer’s. Separate research has found that impaired insulin response was associated with a 30 percent higher risk of Alzheimer’s disease, and overall dementia and cognitive risks were associated with high fasting serum insulin, insulin resistance, impaired insulin secretion and glucose intolerance.
A drop in insulin production in your brain may contribute to the degeneration of your brain cells, mainly by depriving them of glucose, and studies have found that people with lower levels of insulin and insulin receptors in their brain often have Alzheimer’s disease (people with type 2 diabetes often wind up with low levels of insulin in their brains as well). As explained in New Scientist, which highlighted this latest research:
What’s more, it encourages the process through which neurons change shape, make new connections and strengthen others. And it is important for the function and growth of blood vessels, which supply the brain with oxygen and glucose.
As a result, reducing the level of insulin in the brain can immediately impair cognition. Spatial memory, in particular, seems to suffer when you block insulin uptake in the hippocampus. The hippocampus is the elongated ridges on the floor of each lateral ventricle of the brain, thought to be the center of emotion, memory, and the autonomic nervous system. Conversely, a boost of insulin seems to improve its functioning.
When people frequently gorge on fatty, sugary food, their insulin spikes repeatedly until it sticks at a high level. Muscle, liver and fat cells then stop responding to the hormone insulin, meaning they don’t mop up glucose and fat in the blood. As a result, the pancreas desperately works overtime to make more insulin to control the glucose – and levels of the two molecules skyrocket high levels.
The pancreas can’t keep up with the demand indefinitely, however, as time passes people with type 2 diabetes often end up with abnormally low levels of insulin which is the primary cause of these people having high glucose (hyperglycemia).
Stay tune for part II Monday!
“Alzheimer’s is the most common cause of dementia, a general term for memory loss and other cognitive abilities serious enough to interfere with daily life. Alzheimer’s disease accounts for 60 percent to 80 percent of dementia cases.”
Alzheimer’s Association (https://www.alz.org/)
In 2013, Alzheimer’s medical costs in the U.S. totaled $203 billion, an amount that is expected to increase by six times to $1.2 trillion by 2050. The rapid growth in age-related dementia means that caregivers in the field will continually be needed to fulfill a multitude of roles, from the front lines of assisted living care to certified medical professionals.
Sleep Cycle and Dementia
Important caregiver issues related to Alzheimer’s and dementia include sleep cycle disturbances. Nearly 20 percent Alzheimer’s patients experience anxiety late in the day and restlessness at night. The sleep-wake cycle disruptions can cause notable behavioral problems, such as confusion, impaired communication, irritability, fears, disorientation, caregiver frustration and over-activity during normal sleep hours. Exercise, dietary changes and strategic napping can help manage sleep cycle disturbances.
Wandering
Wandering is a condition that affects 60 percent of dementia patients attempting to go to work, visit familiar people or places or simply move when feeling restlessness. The side effect can be serious. To help a patient remain safe and secure under supervised care, arrange a structured routine and identify vulnerabilities when prime wanderings occur, and divert energy to concrete activities.
Driving Issues
Losing the driving privilege that is so inherent to adulthood can feel like a significant loss for a dementia patient struggling to uphold identity and independence. Sensitive reassurance and explaining logistical alternatives clearly, together with a genuine sentiment of concern can help an adult accept a less mobile stage of life without relinquishing the dignity and self-respect that defines him or her as a human being. Re-framing elder years as a time to connect with other people in utilizing public or hired transportation can help an individual cope with a loss while gaining a reward in return.
“The Health Resources and Services Administration (www.HRSA.gov) is the primary federal agency responsible for oversight of the organ and blood stem cell transplant systems in the U.S. and for initiatives to increase organ donor registration and donation in this country. And while we all know Feb. 14 as Valentine’s Day, it is also National Donor Day”
organdonor.org U.S. Government Information on Organ Donation and Transplantation
HISTORY
National Donor Day was started in 1998 by the Saturn Corporation and its United Auto Workers partners, with the support of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and many nonprofit health organizations.
There are over 1,500 national days. Don’t miss a single one. Celebrate Every Day with National Day Calendar!
February 14th is National Donor Day, which aims to raise awareness of the lifesaving benefits of organ, eye and tissue donation while reminding of the importance of discussing the topic with your loved ones. We encourage you to use National Donor Day to discuss organ, eye and tissue donation with those closest to you.
Signing up as an organ, eye and tissue donor means you have made the decision to donate your organs, eyes and tissues at the time of your death. .
Sometimes starting the conversation can be difficult. Learn a few easy ways to “start the conversation here” on the internet. It is important to discuss your decision with your family as that will take priority over your family’s preferences. Making the decision for yourself in advance makes it easier for your family during a very difficult time. Discussing donation with loved ones will help them feel confident and prepared when they are presented with information about the donation process.
So #StartTheConversation today and celebrate your heroic choice to save and heal lives with your family! You can share the love this National Donor Day by starting the conversation with those closest to you.
Let your loved ones know that just one donor can save up to eight lives through organ donation and save and heal more than 75 lives through eye and tissue donation. Learn more about the need for donation and about how individuals can take action by signing up anytime online at DonateLifeColorado.org or DonateLifeWyoming.org.
Want to join in on social media? Share with your loved ones that you signed up to be an organ, eye and tissue donor and why it’s important to you. Be sure to use the hashtag
#StartTheConversation. Help us spread awareness for organ, eye and tissue donation. Signing up gives hope to the 2,000 people right here in our local region who are waiting for a lifesaving organ transplant.
Just one donor can save up to eight lives through organ donation and save and heal up to 75 lives through tissue donation. There are nearly 2,000 awaiting a lifesaving organ transplant in our local region. Learn the facts of donation and share with your loved ones.
Many of those waiting may never get a second chance at life as it is estimated that every day in the U.S. 22 patients die because of the lack of donor organs. Many people who have never considered organ donation or have delayed registering to become a donor do so because of inaccurate information or assumptions about organ donation and transplantation.
One of the post common myths about organ donation is that there is an additional cost the organ and tissue donor’s family or their estate. However, there is in fact no cost to the donor’s family for organ, eye and tissue donation. The local, federally-designated organ procurement organization assumes all costs associated with recovering and processing organs and tissues for transplants once death has been declared and authorization is confirmed through either the donor registry, or from the family in lieu of registration. These costs are never passed on to the donor family. Donor Alliance’s culture and values are built on respecting and appreciating the gift of donation, which we have found is a comfort to both donor families and transplant recipients.
Eventually, the costs are reimbursed by transplant centers. Once a transplant is completed, the transplant center will bill private and public insurance plans. Hospital expenses incurred before the donation of organs or tissue and funeral expenses remain the responsibility of the donor’s family.
“Cardiac rehab therapists work with patients who have chronic heart disease or who have had heart surgery to improve wellness and strength.”
American Heart Association
“Gout is a condition caused by accumulation of excess of uric acid in the bloodstream which deposits unwanted in the joints of the body. Gout can damage the hearing capacity of the ears and in severe cases can affect the kidney functions.”