New reason to quit smoking and other ways to avoid mental decline....

Today's Post: Thursday, 9-22-2011

There at least a dozen effective ways to prevent Alzheimer’s disease and other kinds of mental decline.

Some literally build up your brain. Some prevent it from harm. Many of those also help prevent Alzheimer’s disease too. Some specifically prevent Alzheimer’s disease. And, some make your brain work well or better if you have any brain left to use. There are ways to reverse some kinds of mental decline that mimic Alzheimer’s or are causing it by removing their causes. Removing mercury from your body is one of these. Ensuring adequate levels of vitamin B12 is another.
There are even a few things that actually help people with early stage Alzheimer’s disease to function better.

This post is in three parts.

The first one lists why smoking is so much worse for you than virtually all smokers know it is.

The second one is about the new information that smoking not only causes mental decline and helps cause Alzheimer’s disease, if you smoke and stop your memory gets better very quickly!

And, the third part lists some of the most important ways to prevent Alzheimer’s disease and mental decline.

1. Incredibly, I read recently that a third of the people don’t even know tobacco smoke is bad for you. Yikes!

Most of the rest of people and virtually all smokers have no clue whatever that
smoking is as bad for you as it actually is. They think that smoking’s big problem is that it causes cancer. And smokers tend to assume they will be one of the lucky people who don’t get cancer.

Avoid tobacco smoke.

Yes, it produces 30 % of all cancers and 25% of heavy smokers get lung cancers. To be fair, some smokers don’t get cancer.

NEWSFLASH: Tobacco smoke is horribly worse for you than that. And no one exposed to it escapes harm! (Unfortunately few smokers have any clue about the larger dangers from smoking.)

EVERY single exposure to tobacco smoke begins to deposit the plaque in your arteries that causes high blood pressure, heart attacks, strokes, dementia, and erectile dysfunction. It also causes you have the lung power and breathing capacity of a MUCH older person. This is true even for teens and brand new smokers!

There’s more too!

Exposure to tobacco smoke triggers heart attacks in people who would have otherwise escaped them.

And second hand smoke harms the people who are exposed to it in all the same ways, including babies and small children.

2. One of the main causes of vascular dementia and mental decline is bad circulation to your brain. There is even some evidence that bad blood flow and the things that cause bad blood flow help to cause Alzheimer’s disease.

One study recent found that people who: avoid soft drinks and fast food and packaged foods and eat real food including nonstarchy vegetables and who use mostly olive oil; exercise regularly; and completely avoid tobacco smoke tended to escape getting Alzheimer’s disease.

These things each tend to protect your heart, lower chronic inflammation, keep your blood sugar from being too high and from your blood vessels being destroyed. Guess what? That means your circulation to your brain stays good. And we now know that regular exercise actually grows new brain cells and nerves.

Another study found a direct link from smoking to getting Alzheimer’s disease.
(Given what we now know about bad circulation helping to cause Alzheimer’s disease and how effective tobacco smoke is in causing your circulation to become worse, this is no surprise!)

But just this week, there was better news or much scarier news depending on your point of view.

People who didn’t smoke or who stopped long enough ago, performed 25% better on tests of memory than people who still smoked.

That means that even if you don’t have mental decline yet, if you smoke, your mental abilities are already noticeably less than they would be if you didn’t smoke!

The better news is that if you quit smoking, your memory will get better. And, a 25% difference is a BIG difference.

3. We’ve already listed in parts one and two ways to avoid mental decline and Alzheimer’s disease.

a) Avoid soft drinks and fast food and packaged foods and eat real food including nonstarchy vegetables and use mostly olive oil; exercise regularly; and completely avoid tobacco smoke.

(The DASH II diet with olive oil instead of oils high in omega 6 such as soy, corn, and canola is one way to eat well and stay healthy. The Mediterranean diet with lots of nonstarchy vegetables and less pasta, bread, and processed meats such as salami works well. The paleo diet but, instead of fatty meats from grain fed animals -- eat meat only from 100 % grass fed animals but in moderation, chicken that has been pasture fed or only skinless chicken if grain fed, some eggs, raw and unsalted nuts if you aren’t allergic, wild caught fish that is low in mercury, and beans for protein; then add some olive oil also works.

You’ll notice these 3 diets tend to overlap and all avoid junk foods and refined grain and excessive sugar. And they also all include health OK protein mostly monosaturated oils and oils high in omega 3; and abundant nonstarchy vegetables.)

b) Regular exercise actually grows new brain cells and nerves. And, that’s in addition to its positive effects on better circulation and blood flow to your brain!

c) Your brain is like the internet. If you keep adding new quality information and interconnections, you can lose more of the hardware and still have the system function. But your brain is also better than the internet. Even people over 80 grow new brain cells and interconnections when they learn new things. Learning and regular exercise actually help you to even add more capacity to your brain!

So, educate yourself in areas you find important or find really interesting. Whether scanning the internet for information or formal courses, keep learning new things almost every week.

And, incredibly, people who converse with other people often not only have lower physical stress which helps prevent mental decline, they actually turn their brains on high and get huge mental exercise effects!

How can something that feels so easy most of the time do that?!

We’ve done it since we were very young kids maybe from before we can remember much as younger toddlers. We’ve done it so long it tends to feel quite easy.

But the brain power you use while conversing and your actually measured mental processing while doing it virtually as high as it is solving complex math problems!

So talk to people! Your brain will be in top shape and you’ll feel less stressed if you do it well. Both things prevent mental decline.

d) Avoid ingesting mercury and get enough B vitamins, particularly vitamin B12.

As much as 30% of all high fructose corn syrup contains mercury because of the way it’s made.

It also tends to spike blood sugar which causes obesity, type 2 diabetes and heart disease. Each of these harm your circulation to your brain. And too high levels of blood sugar have been implicated as causes of Alzheimer’s disease.

So, one important way to avoid mental decline and Alzheimer’s disease is to make an extremely strong effort to never eat any high fructose corn syrup! If a treat or other food lists high fructose corn syrup or corn sugar or corn syrup on the label, set it down! Do not buy any or eat or drink any!

Mercury is also in swordfish, shark, and the large King Mackerel although the smaller mackerel tend to not have that much. Don’t eat these three kinds of fish. Tuna are large predatory fish and tend to be moderately high in mercury. If you already have too much mercury or are pregnant or breast feeding, don’t eat ANY tuna. Eating some tuna once or twice a month is likely OK for most people. But be sure not to eat it more often than that!

Vegan vegetarians, people taking the potentially beneficial drug metformin, people taking antacids every week or taking proton pump inhibitor drugs for reflux disease and people over 70 who no longer digest their food well all are at risk of mental impairment from lack of vitamin B12.

People who get way too little vitamin B12 become somewhat mentally impaired. In older people who have been B12 deficient for a good bit, this can even look like Alzheimer’s disease. But it isn’t & getting enough B12 will mostly reverse this kind of mental decline.

If your blood levels of B12 test very low, the most effective way to restore them is to have your doctor who helped you get the test and saw the very low results to give you B12 shots.

You can also take 1,000 mcg a day of a form of B12 in small tablets that dissolve in your mouth and the B12 goes directly into your blood stream. That way if you take antacids every week or taking proton pump inhibitor drugs every day or are old enough your digestion has become less effective, you still get enough B12.

Lastly, if you eat a lot of nonstarchy vegetables or take folic acid or both AND you get enough B12 and avoid tobacco smoke, your homocysteine goes down.

So far, in my view because of how they have tested it, getting enough folate and B12 to lower homocysteine has not yet tested as reversing heart disease.

But lowering homocysteine these 3 ways HAS tested as helping to prevent mental decline.

As you’ve seen, avoiding tobacco smoke and getting enough B12 work in more than one way to prevent mental decline. So does getting enough folate from eating a lot of nonstarchy vegetables each week.

e) There is some evidence that the curcumin in turmeric which is one of the main ingredients in curry spice and getting 4,000 iu to 8,000 iu a day of vitamin D3 not only each help your body prevent the beta amyloid plaques that are part of the process of causing Alzheimer’s disease, they also help your body reverse the process new research has found. Best of all they seem to work even better if you get both of them! (People in India who eat curried foods almost every day hardly ever get Alzheimer’s disease which is how this effect was initially discovered.)

Also, when I added taking curcumin and eating curried food a few times a week and eating some ginger, a cousin of turmeric, most days, my LDL cholesterol fell by 30 points! Dr Dean Ornish notes this effect in his book, The Spectrum: A Scientifically Proven Program to Feel Better, Live Longer, Lose Weight, and Gain Health. So the lower LDL from doing these 3 things happens to other people too. And it’s a lot cheaper and dramatically safer way to lower LDL than taking statin drugs.

f) Eating organic blueberries raises your HDL which helps keep your brain’s blood circulation good. But doing this apparently does far more for your brain.

People who have had minor mental decline who start eating a lot of blueberries each week, often reverse several years worth of decline and have measurably better memory.

(I eat a large serving of organic blueberries three times a week. And I take a bilberry supplement once a day. Bilberries are a kind of blueberry.)