Prevent Alzheimer’s, vascular dementia, and mental decline....

Today's Post:  Friday, 11-30-2012

1.  Whatever is important to you -- if your memory or your ability to mentally manage what you do to succeed in it goes away or you cease to exist, your ability to have and do what you care about is gone.

Do you want that to happen to you?

In our economy, if a large percentage of our best educated and wisest and most experienced people have to be taken care of and can contribute nothing, can they create jobs?  Won’t that make our economy dramatically weaker?

That’s beginning to happen now! 

Do you want that to keep getting worse when it could stop happening?

The various dementias and kinds of mental decline do these things. From minor memory loss to being completely erased as a person in your brain followed by death, they are horrifying.

2.  But they are surprisingly preventable!

We’ve posted on this topic before.

But Parade Magazine recently said that November is Alzheimer’s awareness month.

3.  So I decided to post on some of the many methods that prevent these things.

a)  It’s now known that taking curcumin supplements along with black pepper daily or eating a lot of curried foods with the yellow spice turmeric also with black pepper most days each week, largely prevent Alzheimer’s disease.  The research found this both tends to lower the amount of tau protein that causes the build up the harmful beta amyloid that seems to cause the damage and help your body remove beta amyloid from your brain cells.

(Doing this also is anti-inflammatory for people just now learning to avoid eating excessive omega 6 oils as we discussed in yesterday’s post  or who have conditions like osteoarthritis that feel better and stop getting worse when you turn down inflammation.

And in the book Anti-Cancer, it’s well described that this also helps prevent cancer.)

But there is more help in doing this to avoid mental decline too!

Alzheimer’s disease may be partly caused and definitely speeded up by excessive inflammation and excessive LDL cholesterol causing cardio vascular disease and reduced blood flow to the brain.  This is also the main cause of vascular dementia. 

So besides directly preventing Alzheimer’s disease it is very helpful that eating or taking turmeric lowers LDL cholesterol and excessive inflammation – because it helps ensure less heart disease and maintains good blood flow to your brain.

b)  Taking at least 3,000 to 4,000 iu a day of vitamin D3 tends to help this process particularly in helping to clean out excessive beta amyloid in your brain because doing so boosts the health and effectiveness of the cells in your immune system that do so.

c)  Your brain is like the internet with thousands of nodes and interconnections. 

That means that if you learn enough to multiply the connections five fold, you can lose more of the nodes without turning off the effective communications than you otherwise could.

Then too, in the brain, there is a chance that adding new connections continuously tends to grow new brain cells and may slow down the damage of Alzheimer’s disease.

So people who keep learning and people who already learned a great deal or speak several languages or many of these develop less brain damage and can sustain far more without loss in function. 

In fact, people who speak several languages rarely show any symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease even when they have beta amyloid build up and may also have less.

We also now know from brain scans that while talking to people and socializing feels easy, it produces brain activity comparable to the physical effort that a professional basketball player exerts during a fast paced game!

That would predict that people who maintain a lot of friends and acquaintances they talk to regularly would have less apparent Alzheimer’s disease.

And, that is exactly what studies have found!

Secondly, did you know that people who exercise most days of every week produce a nerve cell growth hormone that creates new nerves and brain cells called BDNF?

We now know it does just that!

And, that would predict that as people get older who never exercise, their brains would shrink and people who always exercised would avoid that problem.

And the research shows that is precisely the case.

That means that continuously learning and socializing to add new interconnections in your brain and adding new brain cells AND better circulation to keep from losing brain cells with exercise would be enormously protective.

Your brain, as your internal internet would then always have more nodes and interconnections and able to stand far more damage and still work well.

It does! 

And research has found that keeping your omega 6 levels low and getting enough omega 3 oils and in particular, taking DHA supplements also helps keep you from losing brain cells.

So if you do these things, you tend to turn off Alzheimer’s and multiply the amount of damage your brain can sustain without its performance for either memory or decision making dropping off.

Interestingly, strength training has been found to restore decision making abilities in older people where their decision making abilities had declined.

d)  Vascular dementia is caused by too much drop off in blood circulation and a drop off in blood circulation tends to speed up and may help cause Alzheimer’s disease.

But that’s close to totally preventable! 

People without heart disease or high blood sugar avoid it.

People who do interval cardio a few days of every week, massively crank up the circulation to every part of their body on those days – including their brains.  Research has found that on days people exercise in the morning or while at work, their mental performance goes up.  And it was just reported that exercising after you learn something you want to remember helps you store the information in long term memory.

And, if you also follow a lifestyle that prevents strokes, a total shut down of circulation, and prevents heart disease, doing that besides the exercise, not only prevents heart attacks and strokes, it prevents circulation drop off to your brain.

Slashing your omega 6 intake and increasing your omega 3 intake does this.

Completely, 100 %, avoiding ingesting heart attack starters such as hydrogenated oils also high in omega 6.   (Hydrogenated oils don’t leave your body quickly.  So if you eat ANY on a regular basis, you accumulate and ALWAYS have harmful amounts in your body.)

Completely, 100 % avoiding tobacco smoke both avoids the gradual closure of your blood vessels which even light smoking and second hand smoke cause, it ALSO avoids triggering heart attacks and strokes you otherwise would have escaped.  (Though many people do not, some smokers avoid cancers.  BUT none of them escape this gradual creation of heart disease not even light smokers or brand new smoker!)

Do the things that reduce your small particle LDL that eating hydrogenated oils boosts instead.

Anything that increases your HDL and or lowers your triglycerides does this.  And so does stopping ingesting anything that, like hydrogenated oils that does the reverse.

Two major things that we know directly lower small particle LDL and not only lower heart attack risk but lower death rates are:

Doing vigorous exercise such as interval cardio or strength training almost every week or doing  over 1,000 to 1500 calories a week of moderate exercise or both directly lowers small particle LDL.

So does taking niacin even in as little as one 300 mg dose after a larger meal each day.

Other major ways to boost HDL include eating egg yolks or taking some kind of choline supplements, taking pantothenic acid, B5, of 200 to 300 mg a day and so does drinking red wine in moderation.

Using only olive oil apparently does NOT increase HDL as once thought. BUT eating omega 6 oils also LOWERS HDL while only using olive oil does not.

A huge thing to avoid is anything but the tiniest amounts of high fructose corn syrup, artificial sweeteners, foods made out of refined grains, and large servings of real sugar.

Why? 

People who eat this stuff several times a day or drink soft drinks either regular or diet several times a day develop low HDL and sky high triglycerides – in addition to developing blood sugar problems and gaining fat.

Guess what that means?  It means that ingesting this stuff boosts the dickens out of your small particle LDL – just like tobacco smoke and eating hydrogenated oils.

If you avoid it all except refined grains and real sugar very occasionally, this means that you also remove a major cause of heart attacks, strokes, and mental decline!

But in this case, removing these foods and drinks from your life counts DOUBLE in preventing heart disease, strokes, vascular dementia, AND Alzheimer’s disease.

Why?

Because in addition to no longer directly causing heart disease with small particle LDL, deleting this stuff from you life along with getting regular vigorous exercise prevents and tends to reverse high blood sugar and type 2 diabetes too!

It seems that excessive blood sugars stick onto both your small particle LDL and the large particle LDL that normally just rolls harmless along. 

Research has found that this acts like adding SPIKES to all the LDL in your blood!

That does the triple -- causing heart disease, increasing inflammation to do more damage and even destroying capillaries!

If you have high blood sugar from ingesting this stuff and not exercising, it directly shuts down circulation to your brain by doing these things.

That’s why slamming the door on ingesting this stuff and exercising every week prevents both vascular dementia and Alzheimer’s disease.

e) Other things help and other things can cause dementia such as getting enough B12 and other B vitamins and eating wild, organic blueberries on the helpful and damage reducing side and avoiding ingesting aluminum which may help cause Alzheimer’s.

Not getting enough B 12 and other B complex vitamins in older people can cause dementia.  Adding them tends to reverse this!

Eating blueberries not only helps prevent strokes, older people with just some mental decline reversed it when they ate blueberries often!

Avoiding excessive mercury intake helps prevent mental decline.

And, ingesting avoidable aluminum and not using it in deodorants may help prevent mental decline too.

It’s hard to say whether the aluminum in beta amyloid caused it to be there or just got stuck onto it as an innocent bystander.  But since is such a definite finding, it seems prudent to avoid ingesting a lot of it. 

There are double acting baking powders and deodorants that have no aluminum in them.  Some pickle contain alum.  But some do not.  And for most applications cast iron pans or stainless steel plans or aluminum core pans clad 100% by stainless steel avoid adding aluminum to your cooking while direct use of aluminum cookware does not.

Whew!

That is a lot to do. 

But all of it not only prevents mental decline, it also prevents cancers and heart attacks and strokes and extends your life.  It also slashes the amount of  excess fat you carry.

So why not gradually build up to doing all of it.

Your brain will work better and last longer and so will the rest of you!