News on 3 new ways to prevent Alzheimer’s disease and mental decline....

Today's Post: Friday, 8-19-2011

For a summary of the other ways likely to be effective in doing this, see my recent posts on Thursday, 7-21 and Friday, 7-22. (The combination of eating curried foods often and taking curcumin from the turmeric in curry each day and taking 4,000 to 10,000 iu a day of vitamin D3 new research has found can prevent Alzheimer’s disease and may even reverse it in its early stages.)

The good news is that there many other effective ways to do this as well.

Following most of the obvious good health habits was in the news recently as doing just that.

Not smoking or eating or drinking junk and getting regular exercise and eating lots of high nutrition vegetables and fruit every week not only prevented other kinds of mental decline, they reduced the incidence of Alzheimer’s disease.

This post has three more new methods to add from news I saw recently.

1. Apples and apple juice have been known to have some antiviral effects. Since activating the part of your immune system that removes amyloid plaque seems to be how curcumin and vitamin D3 do the job, it makes sense to see if apples or apple juice might help.

Further, people who drink one glass of real juice daily whether a real fruit juice or a vegetable juice have been found to have less mental decline and Alzheimer’s disease.

The research found that apples may do more than that. In Alzheimer’s disease, the amount of acetyl choline, an essential chemical for nerves to communicate with each other gets too low. The research found that drinking apple juice seemed to prevent this.

(If you are working to lose weight or keep off extra fat, eating a whole apple or applesauce with no sugar added may be better than drinking apple juice. And, the fiber in them and the other nutrients in the apple peel have other health benefits too.)

2. Drinking moderate amounts of alcohol, one a day for women and up to two a day for men but rarely more, was in the news yesterday as cutting the risk of getting Alzheimer's disease and other kinds of dementia by 23 percent.

Researchers at Loyola University Chicago Stritch School of Medicine analyzed 143 studies and also found that drinking wine was better at producing this effect than other kinds of alcoholic drinks.

Heavy drinking, about double the amount of moderate drinking or more, tended to wipe out this effect entirely. That much drinking either indicates harmful levels of stress or outruns the ability of your liver to protect your nerves from the alcohol.

The best news is that this protection from moderate drinking remained even after adjusting for age, sex, education, and even smoking!

3. Dr Brownstein’s email I got today also had something significant.

Using B vitamins to lower homocysteine as a method to prevent heart disease so far has not been tested as effective. In that use the homocysteine may be an indicator of another problem. So lowering it may be like removing smoke without putting out the fire. Then too, most of these tests were on people where the damage was already done.

But lowering homocysteine with B vitamins DID test as preventing mental decline not long ago.

The study in Dr Brownstein’s email may explain why.

Poor blood flow tends to cause both vascular dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. That’s why following heart protective practices and getting regular exercise for sure each week prevents mental decline.

It seems that a randomized, placebo-controlled study found that daily oral supplementation with 0.8 mg of folic acid (800 mcg) & 0.4 mg (400 mcg) of vitamin B12 was associated with significant increases in blood flow, as compared to placebo. The study was published in the March 7, 2011, issue of Coronary Artery Disease.

This may or may not be helpful to your heart as it may have such good or such bad blood flow this may not help or help more. But getting enough blood flow to your brain is ALWAYS important.