Slash your Alzheimer’s risk with one simple dietary change

If you want to avoid the misery of Alzheimer’s disease (AD), start cutting foods and beverages with refined added sugars from your diet.

It’s really that simple. And there are two reasons why this message is essential:

  • One: Excess refined sugar and simple carbohydrates (white bread, white rice, pasta, etc.) increase your risk of type 2 diabetes, which doubles your risk of AD.
  • Two: Those same foods also increase your risk of type 3 diabetes.

And if you haven’t heard much about type 3 diabetes, that’s very likely to change over the next decade. Especially since researchers are finding that type 3 doesn’t just put you at risk of AD, but many believe it’s the deeply rooted cause of most AD cases.

I’ll talk more about type 3 in just a moment. But first, let’s back up and talk about how this new type of diabetes came to be in the first place…

Avoiding the plaques and tangles

Fifteen years ago, researchers thought they had a handle on the cause of AD. They had found clear evidence that a protein called tau begins an abnormal accumulation that forms into tangles, disrupting neurons in areas of the brain that store memories.

In addition, amyloid beta — another protein — creates plaques between neurons, further complicating normal brain function.

With this knowledge, drug companies poured billions into research to create drugs that would disrupt abnormal tau and amyloid beta accumulation.

Unfortunately, AD has proven to be far more complicated than that. (And the drug companies have many failures to show for it.)

For example, in one study, researchers examined autopsy results for hundreds of brains in participants who had volunteered for the study while still in good health. The analysis found no evidence of tangles and plaques in many of the patients who developed AD, while in some people with “normal cognition” the tangles and plaques were present.

More recently, scientists have focused on what they call the Adaptive Response Hypothesis. They believe that Alzheimer’s develops in response to a combination of three factors:

  • Chronic inflammation
  • Oxidative stress
  • Metabolic dysfunction

Of course, metabolic dysfunction involves insulin resistance, and this is where type 3 diabetes comes into play.

This is your brain on insulin

When you think of insulin, you might think of the pancreas (where it’s made), or the blood vessels where it does much of its work, protecting your blood from excess glucose and delivering it throughout your body.

What you might not think of when it comes to insulin is your brain.

But insulin serves a number of important functions within your gray matter, beginning with management of your brain’s glucose metabolism.

In Dr. Marc Micozzi’s Complete Alzheimer’s Cure, he adds these important notes about insulin: “It helps regulate transmission of signals from one neuron (nerve cell) to another. And it influences their growth as well as their ability to adapt to changes and survive.”

In other words, when insulin malfunctions in your brain and blood sugar is poorly controlled, your brain begins to malfunction. This is the idea behind the concept of type 3 diabetes.

In his protocol, Dr. Micozzi discusses an Australian study of 250 adults that showed how high blood sugar levels appear to damage the brain — even among those who don’t have type 1 or type 2 diabetes.

Specifically, he says, high blood sugar levels “cause the areas associated with memory, cognitive function, and emotional processing to shrink. And impairments in these areas are the hallmark symptoms of Alzheimer’s dementia.

“In fact, these researchers found that highly-educated people in their 60s, with even mildly elevated blood sugar, had the brains of unhealthy people in their 70s.”

Your healthy brain buffet

Dr. Micozzi puts it this way: “[AD] could be yet another catastrophic impact of poor diets.” So naturally, he adds that improving your diet is the best place to start improving your brain health.

And you can begin by eliminating the primary foods that cause your blood sugar — and, in turn, your insulin — to go haywire:

  • Processed, packaged junk foods
  • Sugary foods
  • Refined carbs like white bread and pasta

As for foods that do support brain health, Dr. Micozzi offers some basic — but valuable — guidelines:

  • Meat is a nutrient-dense source of minerals and vitamins A, B, and D. It’s also obviously an excellent source of protein. And meat is also a terrific source of omega-3 fatty acids, which help build and support brain structure and nerve cell membranes.
  • Eggs are considered “a perfect food” by Dr. Micozzi. Like meat, eggs are a good source of brain-nourishing cholesterol and other nutrients.
  • Seafood is another good source of omega-3 fatty acids. It also helps support production of a chemical called brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), which plays a role in the survival and growth of neurons.

Dr. Micozzi recommends that you try to get several servings of each of these foods per week.

He also has several additional recommendations for foods and nutrients that help keep your brain metabolism in optimal working order to avoid Alzheimer’s or type 3 diabetes. To learn more, check out his Complete Alzheimer’s Cure protocol. Click here for more information, or to enroll today.

SOURCES

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3439198/
Overview and Findings from the Rush Memory and Aging Project
Current Alzheimer Research
July 1, 2012