Alzheimer's Disease: Signs May Appear Decade Before Symptoms

Brain Shrinking Precedes Memory Loss by Nearly 10 Years, Researchers Say

http://abcnews.go.com/Health/MindMoodNews/alzheimers-disease-signs-decade-symptoms/story?id=13365031

Just watched this, absolutely brilliant news:

Coconut Oil touted as Alzheimer's remedy:

http://www.cbn.com/tv/1472017228001

(sorry about the source, but it was sent by a family member)

Ps: I have been a big fan and user of Coconut oil for a whole host of things already, but this is really amazing news!

Anti-Inflammatories - Ginger and Turmeric - YouTube

Just watched this, absolutely brilliant news:

Coconut Oil touted as Alzheimer's remedy:

http://www.cbn.com/tv/1472017228001

(sorry about the source, but it was sent by a family member)

Ps: I have been a big fan and user of Coconut oil for a whole host of things already, but this is really amazing news!

Or go on a low-carb diet to switch over from using glucose to using ketones as your energy source.

BTW if you consume a lot of coconut milk, you can get away with eating tons of protein and even some carbs and still enter ketosis (it's a variant of the classic ketogenic diet http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ketogenic_diet#Classic). I did it myself this past weekend; after having eaten a bagel on Friday, by Monday I was in ketosis. Then I ran out of the milk and just ate meat and veggies, but I didn't eat enough fat and left ketosis.

The coconut fat is the key here, your body very easily produces ketones from the medium-chain triglycerides. So you can eat like a king and still be in ketosis.

Note: Presumably medium-chain triglycerides from other sources would also work, I haven't tried it yet.

damn! i know i clicked the link to this post for a reason. i just can't remember why. *shrug*

BTW if you consume a lot of coconut milk, you can get away with eating tons of protein and even some carbs and still enter ketosis (it's a variant of the classic ketogenic diet http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ketogenic_diet#Classic). I did it myself this past weekend; after having eaten a bagel on Friday, by Monday I was in ketosis. Then I ran out of the milk and just ate meat and veggies, but I didn't eat enough fat and left ketosis.

The coconut fat is the key here, your body very easily produces ketones from the medium-chain triglycerides. So you can eat like a king and still be in ketosis.

Note: Presumably medium-chain triglycerides from other sources would also work, I haven't tried it yet.

Yes I guess they would, but coconut oil is the only option that contains it in those amounts, if you don't want to go for processed one's where they have been specifically isolated and drawn out, that is.

I'm personally not that intrigued by the ketosis-factor and of the idea of purposefully wanting to reach that state with consuming unnatural compositions of food going the extreme LC-route, but this "shortcut" through the coconut oils MCTs is benign, and in any case preferable.

Now, I think coconut oil is great and would recommend it as the best fat along with butter, and as the best cooking oil in particular, but the benefit as I see it stems from its very benefitial saturated fatty-acid profile and super stable characteristics.

It keeps in room temperature for years, and even at higher temperatures for a very long time, because since it's grown in tropical regions, it needs to be highly saturated in order to not spoil in the heat, while at the same time staying liquid and biological active at the temperature it is in. And while it's still solid in room-temperature, our body temperature is far above that melting point, of course, making the simplistic medical dogma portraying the stale coconut oil (or stick of butter) that one gets out of the fridge as a potential cause of clogger of arteries, that many people (and doctors) still even to this day believe there is some truth to, beyond idiotitc. So while being just as "liquid and fluid" in the body as say the nation health-wrecking McDonalds oil blend of soy, corn and canola, they differ greatly when it comes to stability. Try leaving those oils at 37 degrees C (98.6 F), in a batch with a coconut oil beside it for comparison, for a couple of weeks or months, and see how they fend. Then compare that batch of oil turned disgusting and rancid to that of the totally fresh and non-oxidated coconut oil, and then take into account that these fatty acids, when consumed, ends up depositing in your tissue to a varying degree and then being released and circulating as free fatty acids.

Which of these sound like the preferable choice to have in your body on an instinctive level?

So when it comes to alzheimer's mentioned earlier in the thread, keeping in mind that the brain is very plastic and is made up of over 50% fat, I think there's something to the theory that can be understood on a very basic, mechanical level, that one of the benefits derived from eating coconut-oil is that it displaces these poly-unsaturated, highly unstable, fats that accumulates in our tissue and brain, especially as the normal person eats a modern diet with these unsaturated vegetable oils that has never been in our food supply until recently, and pushes that balance towards a better, more saturated, "fresher" fatty acid profile again, and towards a healthier more resilient constitution, like that of a healthy adult, or healthy teenager (we're born with very scarce amounts of unsaturated fatty acids in our tissues).

I did the paleo diet for a few years until my cholesteral spiked to 280 and I started feeling a pressure on my chest. I immediately reversed course and cut the saturated fats probably 80%, ceased cooking with butter and coconut oil 100%, started breakfast with 3 egg whites on a homemade sourdough bread (no butter) and feel much better. All pressure on the chest is gone. Once a couple more months pass I'll get a blood workup and see where the cholesterol has dropped to. I'm hoping around 200. The thing about the paleodiet or primal diet is that it demands lots of cardio to offset the massive intake of saturated fats. If you are not doing that you are messing up. Personally I work physically (although not cardio) 40 hours a week so over weekends or after work the last thing I feel like doing is exercising, so I wasn't getting enough cardio. I basically lost faith in the diet, although it was great for my hypoglycemia. The reason I was doing it to begin with. Another side effect of high protein, high fat, low carb diets is constipation.

Science News

Brain's 'Garbage Truck' May Hold Key to Treating Alzheimer's and Other Disorders (http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/06/130627142402.htm)

June 27, 2013 — In a perspective piece appearing today in the journal Science, researchers at University of Rochester Medical Center (URMC) point to a newly discovered system by which the brain removes waste as a potentially powerful new tool to treat neurological disorders like Alzheimer's disease. In fact, scientists believe that some of these conditions may arise when the system is not doing its job properly.

http://images.sciencedaily.com/2013/06/130627142402.jpg

"Essentially all neurodegenerative diseases are associated with the accumulation of cellular waste products," said Maiken Nedergaard, M.D., D.M.Sc., co-director of the URMC Center for Translational Neuromedicine and author of the article. "Understanding and ultimately discovering how to modulate the brain's system for removing toxic waste could point to new ways to treat these diseases."

The body defends the brain like a fortress and rings it with a complex system of gateways that control which molecules can enter and exit. While this "blood-brain barrier" was first described in the late 1800s, scientists are only now just beginning to understand the dynamics of how these mechanisms function. In fact, the complex network of waste removal, which researchers have dubbed the glymphatic system, was only first disclosed by URMC scientists last August in the journal Science Translational Medicine.

The removal of waste is an essential biological function and the lymphatic system -- a circulatory network of organs and vessels -- performs this task in most of the body. However, the lymphatic system does not extend to the brain and, consequently, researchers have never fully understood what the brain does its own waste. Some scientists have even speculated that these byproducts of cellular function where somehow being "recycled" by the brain's cells.

One of the reasons why the glymphatic system had long eluded comprehension is that it cannot be detected in samples of brain tissue. The key to discovering and understanding the system was the advent of a new imaging technology called two-photon microscopy which enables scientists to peer deep within the living brain. Using this technology on mice, whose brains are remarkably similar to humans, Nedergaard and her colleagues were able to observe and document what amounts to an extensive, and heretofore unknown, plumbing system responsible for flushing waste from throughout the brain.

The brain is surrounded by a membrane called the arachnoid and bathed in cerebral spinal fluid (CSF). CSF flows into the interior of the brain through the same pathways as the arteries that carry blood. This parallel system is akin to a donut shaped pipe within a pipe, with the inner ring carrying blood and the outer ring carrying CSF. The CSF is draw into brain tissue via a system of conduits that are controlled by a type support cells in the brain known as glia, in this case astrocytes. The term glymphatic was coined by combining the words glia and lymphatic.

The CSF is flushed through the brain tissue at a high speed sweeping excess proteins and other waste along with it. The fluid and waste are exchanged with a similar system that parallels veins which carries the waste out of the brain and down the spine where it is eventually transferred to the lymphatic system and from there to the liver, where it is ultimately broken down.

While the discovery of the glymphatic system solved a mystery that had long baffled the scientific community, understanding how the brain removes waste -- both effectively and what happens when this system breaks down -- has significant implications for the treatment of neurological disorders.

One of the hallmarks of Alzheimer's disease is the accumulation in the brain of the protein beta amyloid. In fact, over time these proteins amass with such density that they can be observed as plaques on scans of the brain. Understanding what role the glymphatic system plays in the brain's inability to break down and remove beta amyloid could point the way to new treatments. Specifically, whether certainly key 'players' in the glymphatic system, such as astrocytes, can be manipulated to ramp up the removal of waste.

"The idea that 'dirty brain' diseases like Alzheimer may result from a slowing down of the glymphatic system as we age is a completely new way to think about neurological disorders," said Nedergaard. "It also presents us with a new set of targets to potentially increase the efficiency of glymphatic clearance and, ultimately, change the course of these conditions."

I did the paleo diet for a few years until my cholesteral spiked to 280 and I started feeling a pressure on my chest. I immediately reversed course and cut the saturated fats probably 80%, ceased cooking with butter and coconut oil 100%, started breakfast with 3 egg whites on a homemade sourdough bread (no butter) and feel much better. All pressure on the chest is gone. Once a couple more months pass I'll get a blood workup and see where the cholesterol has dropped to. I'm hoping around 200. The thing about the paleodiet or primal diet is that it demands lots of cardio to offset the massive intake of saturated fats. If you are not doing that you are messing up. Personally I work physically (although not cardio) 40 hours a week so over weekends or after work the last thing I feel like doing is exercising, so I wasn't getting enough cardio. I basically lost faith in the diet, although it was great for my hypoglycemia. The reason I was doing it to begin with. Another side effect of high protein, high fat, low carb diets is constipation.

I've had somewhat similar experiences, and did not fend great with too low a carb/ too high a fat- intake in the long run. Well, I still did ok, and it would had been positively disastrous if the fat instead had been composed of vegetable oils, but I think and tend to agree that the very heavy reliance on the saturated fats are unneccesary and probably unwise in the long run, and that the simple change of excluding veg oils/margarine and sticking to butter/(olive)/coconut-oil is probably a sounder and definitely simplier step for most. The proportions/ratio matter of the fats probably matters more than the volume, so a fat intake leaning towards the low side that is saturated is still good. So in the case of making eggs for breakfast: instead of doing an over the top "paleo omelet" with tons of coconut oil and 2 whole eggs+ some extra yolks (:D), and eating it plain with black coffee feeling like a warrior, a regular omelet with a couple of eggs cooked in some butter in pan, you know, the way that a sane person that has not a head filled with endless conflicting diet advice would make it, along with some orange juice, toast and coffee, is a far better, and far more enjoyable, option. Back to basics.

http://www.coconutresearchcenter.org/