By Barbara Berkeley
It’s funny how we tend to think of the brain as a different kind of organ, one that has jobs that are quite distinct from the activities going on in the rest of us. But nothing could be further from t truth. The brain is fed by the same blood vessels and blood supply as the rest of the body. It is completely and intimately connected to the moment to moment choices made by that body. If you don’t believe me, just think of what happens a few minutes after you take a shot of tequila. The alcohol started in your stomach but suddenly it’s right there in your brain urging you to join the conga line.
In the same vein, we tend to believe that Alzheimer’s disease is a mysterious ailment that appears out of the blue and has no connection to the rest of our body. After all, it’s a brain disease, and in our conceptual framework the brain is mysterious, foreign and disconnected.
Recent research refutes this idea and forces us to look, yet again, at the effects of the Standard American Diet (SAD) on every aspect of our human form. This time, the subject is dementia. Researchers at the International Conference on Alzheimer’s Disease held in Vienna predicted that by 2040 one third of the 81 million expected cases of AD will directly result from obesity and the diabetes it spawns.
Let me digress here for a moment and give you my thoughts about diabetes. We waste far too much precious time setting cut-offs for where diabetes begins. We pay far too little attention to warnings about diabetes if we have normal blood sugar. Any time we become insulin resistant (meaning that our insulin system stops sending effective signals and begins to compensate with insulin overproduction), we are part of the diabetes continuum. This is true whether blood sugar is “normal” or not. Millions of people have insulin resistance with normal sugars and are never even labeled pre-diabetic. This situation can go on for years while they continue to eat insulin stimulating diets and do untold harm to their bodies. Insulin resistance is likely if you are overweight or have been overweight. It also becomes more common as we age. The SAD encourages and promotes this problem by asking our body to secrete so much insulin so constantly (in response to the massive amount of starch and sugar we consume). So let’s look at the research below in the following light; if you are reading this as a dieter or maintainer, there is a good chance that you are or have been insulin resistant.
Here’s what was reported by Dr. Susan Craft, an AD researcher and what you need to know:
“A large body of work now suggests that insulin resistance increases the risk of Alzheimer’s by multiple mechanisms, Dr. Craft said. Far from being active only in the periphery, insulin binds to receptors located throughout the brain….High levels of insulin in the brain can induce a brain insulin-resistance by removing the insulin receptors from the nerve cell membranes.”
In the rest of the body, insulin resistance starts off a cascade of problems that affect the health of blood vessels. It’s not surprising that recent findings point to the same phenomenon in the brain. Brain insulin resistance seems to lead to vascular dysfunction. Blood supply to all tissues is critical, but particularly so to the brain, where blockages in the delivery of oxygen via the blood stream can lead to multiple small mini-strokes. These small areas of damage can add up to a larger picture of dementia.
Dr. Zaldy Tan of Harvard Medical School reported additional startling findings at the Alzheimer’s Conference. Subjects with insulin resistance and elevated insulin production had decreases in the actual volume of their brains. These decreases were equivalent to 6 years of brain aging!These subjects didn’t have to be technically diabetic to show such changes.
If you are an RTR reader, you’ve undoubtedly noted my preoccupation with what I call “S Foods” (starches and sugars) . This preoccupation is really just another way of saying that I’m very, very fixated on insulin. And for good reason. Read any research on obesity, diabetes, cholesterol, heart disease, cancer and the word INSULIN will be present. Insulin is a spider sitting in the middle of the web of modern disease. Modern eaters have a problem with insulin and they certainly don’t need any more of it. Eating excessive starches and sugars asks the body to continue deploying the struggling insulin system. It’s simply foolish. And foolhardy.
This discussion also gives us the opportunity to revisit the vital importance of exercise in a maintainer’s life. We all should recognize that exercise sensitizes muscles to insulin, allowing a fragile system to work better. Says Dr. Craft, “Exercise is the most potent insulin-sensitizing agent we have. A single bout of aerobic exercise improves insulin sensitivity for 24 hours. It’s much more potent than any medication.” She goes on: “Caloric restriction also lowers hyperinsulinemia and improves insulin sensitivity.”
So what can we do to protect ourselves from Alzheimer’s Disease? We can eat small amounts of high quality foods. We can make sure that these foods are quite low in starches and sugars. We can exercise. Sound familiar? It should, because the same prescription could be given to prevent and defeat diabetes, high cholesterol, heart disease, stroke, obesity, high blood pressure, premature aging, increased cancer risk and most of man’s other modern diseases. Maybe we could put it this way: we simply need to tame the spider. It’s all quite simple and elegant, not the twisted conundrum that optimal diet is made out to be. Luckily, all of the things that we maintainers are doing to keep weight at bay turn out to have the added benefit of chasing away our other metabolic demons. It’s a nice little extra, isn’t it?
