Recent research indicates that poor diet, particularly a diet high in saturated fat and sugar, may be linked to Alzheimer’s disease. If this connection proves out, the United States and other nations could be facing an overwhelming epidemic of pathology. Standard caveats apply on prognostications of impending doom in health and medicine, with conclusions on our metabolic, circulatory, and cellular systems often seeming as shifting and chaotic as weather systems. The jury is certainly out on this particular theory.
What we DO know, however, is that heart disease, diabetes, and cancer are a plague on the poor and a silent tax that takes the most from those with least; and that poor diet is a major factor driving those epidemics.
Research that I cite in the appendices of my new book, “Inside the Dementia Epidemic: A Daughter’s Memoir,” shows that it’s not so much saturated fat and sugar that contribute to Alzheimer’s disease being “Type III Diabetes,” but simply carbohydrates of all sorts. Our brain needs insulin–in fact produces some insulin itself– but if we flood our body with too much carbohydrate (all of which breaks down to glucose, even “high fiber” carbs), raising our blood sugar and insulin levels, our brain becomes insulin resistant, leaving it vulnerable to damage. I’m a dementia caregiver, not a scientist, but this research is fascinating–and provides some hope that those of us, like me, who are insulin resistant in middle age might decrease our risk of Alzheimer’s disease by keeping our borderline blood sugar levels in check with dietary changes. To read my appendix “Sweet Poison: The Toxic Tide of Sugar,” visit http://www.insidedementia.com.