Mental Decline IS mostly preventable....

Today's Post:  Friday, 5-25-2012

In a health news email I subscribe to there was an article with the information that moderate drinking seems to help prevent mental decline while heavy drinking tends to cause mental decline instead.

(The lower intake seems to relieve stress and promote better circulation while the higher intake of alcohol is too high for your liver to process and nerve damage seems to result.  It’s similar to the difference between taking a nice hot bath and being tossed into boiling water!)

However what sparked this post was a comment in that article:  "At present, there are no proven agents to prevent cognitive decline or dementia"

Simply put this is no longer true -- as long as any kind of action is meant by agents!

In fact there are even four separate kinds of things that have been tested to do so!

1.  Things that directly protect your brain cells

2.  Things that prevent cardiovascular disease

3.  Things that prevent excessively high blood sugar

4.  Things that build up the brain and its interconnections and which preserve function even when much of the brain has been damaged

It IS true there are no single drugs that do so that I'm yet aware of although millions of dollars are being spent to find one.

Since these millions of dollars are NOT spent first by priority on getting more people to know and use the things that have already been shown to work, that's unfortunate to a degree.

So, what does do the job?

A.  For starters, regular exercise fits in all four categories! 

1. & 4.: At least 600 calories of moderate exercise during every week and at least a few minutes of vigorous exercise most days of every week has proven benefits in each of these four categories!  It releases BDNF, a nerve and brain cell growth hormone.  People who don’t do this over time get brain shrinkage while people that do keep their brain size.  This also helps repair some damage cause by various factors.

2.  Cardiovascular disease cuts circulation to the brain. That kind of regular exercise not only improves your cardiovascular health and prevents plaque build up but, over time, the more years you do it regularly, the better your protection gets recent research found.  Even better, every time you exercise your give your brain extra circulation right then.

3.  Too high blood sugar tends to damage or destroy capillaries and cause cardiovascular disease both.  There is even some research to suggest that it directly triggers at least one of the causes of Alzheimer’s disease.

Regular, moderate exercise tends to lower high blood sugar and turn down insulin resistance.  (This may be only partly the case for type 1 diabetics; but for type 2 diabetics and people nearing that state, it works quite well.)

Even better regular, vigorous exercise of even 2 minutes a day has successfully lowered the HBA1C measure.  That means that it cuts too high blood sugar and turns off or down insulin resistance enough the average amount of too high blood sugar gets reduced over a two or three month period!

B.  And there is a LOT more!

 1.  Things that directly protect your brain cells besides exercise.

a) There is increasing evidence that ingesting the spice turmeric along with black pepper in curried foods or taking it or the curcumin derived from turmeric along with black pepper prevents the release of tau proteins that are thought to trigger Alzheimer’s disease and enables your immune system to remove beta amyloid plaque well enough to avoid it causing damage.

Doing so also lowers your LDL cholesterol and lowers your inflammation enough to help prevent heart disease. 

There is also evidence that doing so prevents cancer with the inflammation lowering and by its direct  effects on gene expression in ways that help prevent cancer.

I think taking the curcumin supplement is essential since not everyone likes curry and even people like me who do, don’t want it for dinner every day of the week!

b)  Taking at least 3,000 iu a day of vitamin D3 also seems protective.  It may work with turmeric to make it more effective.  And to the extent the immune system boost vitamin D3 causes helps clear harmful tau protein and beta amyloid it is directly protective.

c)  Taking omega 3 supplements made from purified fish oil and/or eating fish or seafood low in mercury and other pollutants 2 or 3 times a week is directly protective of your brain.  And taking some extra DHA, one of  the kinds of omega 3, also helps. 

(Important note:  farmed fish is fed badly which cuts its omega 3 content and is very heavily loaded with pollutants. Do NOT eat it!)

This set of things works with exercise to prevent brain shrinkage.  Research just found doing this helps prevent harm to your memory from intake of excessive high fructose corn syrup which likely means it helps combat the effects of high blood sugar too.  And, best of all, your brain directly uses DHA. So your brain cells function better when they have enough DHA.

d)  Shortage of many of the B complex vitamins in general and B12 in particular tend to cause brain decline directly and separately from Alzheimer’s disease and circulation problems.  So supplementing with them is very strongly protective; and it’s essential for vegan vegetarians and people over 70.

There have literally been people who were going to be institutionalized for suspected Alzheimer’s who returned to normal by taking enough vitamin B12.

So this is NOT a small effect!

2.  Things that prevent cardiovascular disease besides exercise.

The good news is that there is a LOT you can do.  I can only summarize them here.

Say completely away from tobacco smoke.

Ingest ZERO foods containing hydrogenated oils or trans fats & to do so learn what foods contain this junk.  Doing so helps you lose fat too.

Ingest ZERO foods containing high fructose corn syrup or artificial sweeteners.  Cut WAY back on real sugar intake.  Eat virtually no foods made from refined grains.  Recent research shows this is essential both to prevent heart disease AND excessive blood sugar levels. Doing so helps lose fat and prevent adding it as well.

Taking curcumin and/or eating curries with turmeric also prevents heart disease as we note above.

Cutting way back on the fat from grain fed animals, all grain foods, and oils such as corn and soy high in omega 6 oils along with adding the omega 3 cuts chronic inflammation enough to help protect the inner surface of your blood vessels. So it is also a powerful preventer of cardiovascular disease.  Use extra virgin olive oil instead.  Doing so has been directly shown to prevent mental decline!  Adding the olive oil to far less omega 6 and more omega 3 very likely enhances this effect.

Eat organic berries or take berry supplements such as bilberry or both. Eating organic wild blueberries is very effective. This boosts your HDL and protects your blood vessels.  It’s even been shown to help older people regain seemingly lost brain function.

If your HDL is low or your LDL is high take niacin.  Even 300 mg a day after a meal helps.

If your LDL is too high take sterol supplements such as beta sitosterol.

Because of their many side effects and not being needed if you do all the above, only take statin drugs too if your LDL cholesterol is horribly high, well over 200, or you just had a heart attack AND your doctor has given you the $150 genetic test to see if you are in the minority of people who get good results and protection from statins.  They can cause vigorous exercise to harm you studies found.  Such exercise is too important to jeopardize when NOT necessary!

3.  Things that prevent excessively high blood sugar besides exercise. 

Cutting way back on the fat from grain fed animals, all grain foods, and oils such as corn and soy high in omega 6 oils along with adding the omega 3 cuts chronic inflammation enough to help protect the inner surface of your blood vessels. So it is also a powerful preventer of cardiovascular disease.  Use extra virgin olive oil instead.  Doing so has been directly shown to prevent mental decline!  Adding the olive oil to far less omega 6 and more omega 3 very likely enhances this effect.

People who do this and both kinds of exercise every week tend to NOT get this problem and doing the reverse is all too effective in causing this problem.

Taking the supplements chromium polynicotinate and alpha lipoic acid each help lower high blood sugar.  And there are some others that can help; but those are two of the most effective and available ones.

If you get this problem, taking the drug Metformin does help. So far it is the only diabetes drug  safe enough to take.

Also, this is a problem you can have and not know it.  So to find out, periodically get your fasting glucose and HBA1C tested. Your fasting glucose should always be less than 100 and your HBA1C lower than 5.9.  And readings of  85 or so and 5.6 or a bit less are better.

4.  Things that build up the brain and its interconnections and which preserve function even when much of the brain has been damaged – besides exercise.

Learning new things causes your brain to release BDNF and other nerve growth factors, add new cells, and add LOTS of new interconnections.  This has been found true from infancy to advanced old age!

Secondly, your brain’s associative network is like the internet.  If it has enough nodes and interconnections, you can lose a good bit of them with no drop off in function.

That means the learning is an essential protection for both of these reasons.  You are less likely to lose brain function and you may not notice even if you do!

The facts bear this out. 

People who are highly educated are less likely to get mental decline and if they do, it’s at much older ages.

People who speak more than one language fluently rarely show symptoms of any mental decline.

And, people who have an active social network with people they converse with often, rarely get mental decline.

They are under less stress which is brain protective. 

But the hidden reason for this is that while conversation seems easy since we’ve been doing it since a very young age, it uses massive amounts of your brain as you do it.  Five minutes of conversation may seem easy to effortless most of the time; but it exercise your brain as well as running a five minute mile exercises the rest of you.

That means such socializing is a HUGE protection!