If you could make a list of all the things that could ever happen to you, the very last thing on your list, at the very bottom of the list, the thing you want the least is Alzheimer’s disease, because when you lose your memory, you lose everything. You lose everyone who ever mattered to you. If you could look into the brain of a person who has this disease, what you see is, between the brain cells are these unusual-looking structures. Beta-amyloid protein comes out of the cells, and it accumulates in these little meatball-like structures that are in front of you, on a microscopic slide. They shouldn’t be there, and they are a hallmark of Alzheimer’s disease.
This disease affects about half of Americans by their mid-80s. You could say to your doctor, “OK, I don’t want that. What can I do to stop that?” Your doctor will say, “Well, it’s old age and it’s genetics.” There’s a gene – it’s called the APOE-epsilon4 allele. If you have this gene from one parent, your risk is tripled; if you got it from both parents, your risk is 10 to 15 times higher than it was before. What’s the answer? Get new parents? No, I don’t think so. That’s not it. So, I’m sorry: it’s old age, it’s genes, period, that’s it; there’s not a darn thing you can do just wait for it to happen.
Or maybe not. In Chicago, researchers started something called the Chicago Health and Aging Project. What they did was they looked at what people in Chicago were eating. They did very careful dietary records in hundreds and hundreds of people, and then they started to see who, as the years go by, stayed mentally clear, and who developed dementia.
The first thing they keyed in on was something that I knew about as a kid growing up in Fargo, North Dakota. My mom had five kids, we would run down to the kitchen to the smell of bacon. My mom would take a fork, and she’d stick it into the frying pan and pull the hot bacon strips out and put them on a paper towel to cool down, and when all the bacon was out of the pan, she would carefully lift up that hot pan and pour the grease into a jar to save it – that’s good bacon grease, you don’t want to lose that! My mother would take that jar, and she would put it not in the refrigerator but she’d put it on the shelf, because my mother knew that as bacon grease cools down, what happens to it? It solidifies. And the fact that it’s solid at room temperature is a sign that bacon grease is loaded with saturated fat, bad fat.
We’ve known for a long time that that raises cholesterol, and there’s a lot of in bacon grease. And by the way, the next day, she’d spoon it back into the frying pan and fry eggs in it; it’s amazing any of her children lived to adulthood. That’s the way we lived. The number one source of saturated fat is actually not bacon, it’s dairy products, cheese, and milk, and so forth; and meat is number two. In Chicago, some people ate relatively little saturated fat, around 13 grams a day, and others ate about twice that much, and the researchers just looked at who developed Alzheimer’s disease. And can I show you the figures? Here’s the low group, and there is the high group. In other words, if you are avoiding the bad fat, your risk was pretty low, but if you were tucking into the cheese and the bacon strips, your risk was two, three, or more-fold higher. Then they looked not just at saturated fat, they looked at the fat that’s in doughnuts and pastries; you know what that is, that’s trans fats you’ll see on the labels. They found the very same pattern in there, too. So, the people who tended to avoid the saturated fat and the trans fats, wanted to avoid them for cholesterol and heart disease reasons, but they also seem to affect the brain.
Then researchers in Finland said, “Wait a minute, let’s go further.” There is a condition we call mild cognitive impairment. You’re still yourself – you’re managing your checkbook, you’re driving, your friends know it’s you – but you’re having mental lapses, especially for names and for words. They brought in over 1,000 adults, they were 50 years old, and they looked at their diets. Then, as time went on, they looked to see who developed mild cognitive impairment. Some of these people ate relatively little fat, some people ate a fair amount, and then they looked at whose memory started to fail. They found exactly the same pattern. In other words, it’s not just, “Will I get Alzheimer’s disease?” but, “Will I just have old age memory problems?”
Well, what about that gene, that APOE-epsilon4 allele the one that condemns you to Alzheimer’s disease? Well, they then redid the study, and they focused only on those people, and some of these people ate relatively little fat, some people ate more, and… exactly the same. In other words, if you are avoiding the bad fats, even if you have the gene, your risk of developing memory problems was cut by 80%. And this is my most important point: genes are not destiny.
Let’s take another look in those plaques. We know there’s beta amyloid protein, but there’s also iron and copper. Metals in my brain? That’s right, there are metals in foods, and they get into the brain. Now think about this: I have a cast-iron pan, and we had a backyard barbecue, and a week later, I remember, “Oh… I left my frying pan on the picnic table, and it rained last week.” What happened to my pan? It rusted, and that rust is oxidation. Or you take a shiny new penny, and does it stay shiny forever? No, it oxidizes too. Well, iron and copper oxidize in your body, and as they do that, they cause the production of what are called free radicals. You’ve heard of free radicals: free radicals are molecules that are swimming around in your bloodstream, and they get into the brain, and they act like sparks that seam through the connections between one cell and the next.
So, how is this happening? Where am I getting all this iron? Where am I getting all this copper? How can that be? How many people have a cast iron pan? Let me see hands. If that’s your once a month pan, I’m going to say, “Who cares?” But if it’s every single day, you’re getting the iron into your food, and it’s more iron than your body needs. Or copper pipes. Who has copper pipes? That water sits in the copper pipes all night long, and in the morning it goes into the coffee maker, and you’re drinking that copper, you get more than you need, and it starts producing these free radicals that go to the brain. If you’re a meat eater, of especially liver, there’s iron and copper in those foods too. And we used to think, “Isn’t that great?” until we realized iron is a double-edged sword. You need a little bit, but if you have too much, it becomes toxic.
Vitamins. Vitamin manufacturers put in vitamin A, and the B vitamins, and vitamin C, and vitamin D. And then they throw in iron and copper, thinking, “Well, you need these,” not recognizing you’re already getting enough in foods, and if they add it to your supplement, you are getting too much. OK, so what am I saying? What I’m saying is aside from the fact that the saturated fat and the trans fats will increase our risk, these metals will, too, and they are causing sparks to form in the brain, free radicals to form that seam through the connections. And if that’s the case, then I need a fire extinguisher. And we have one, and it’s called vitamin E. Vitamin E is in spinach, and it’s in mangoes, and it’s especially in nuts and seeds. And in Chicago, some people eat a little bit of it, and some people eat a lot of it, and the beauty of this is vitamin E is an antioxidant: it knocks out free radicals. So, if what I’m saying is true, then the people in Chicago who ate only a little bit of vitamin E would be at much higher risk than people who ate a lot, and that’s exactly what the research showed. People getting eight milligrams a day of vitamin E cut their risk of Alzheimer’s by about half compared to people getting less than that.
Hmm, OK, how do I get that? It’s very, very easy: run to the store and just buy a bottle of vitamin E pills. No, I don’t think so, and here’s why not. Nature has eight forms of vitamin E. It’s built into nuts and into seeds, but if I put it into my supplement pill, I can legally call it vitamin E if it has only one form. And if you’re eating too much of one form of vitamin E, it reduces your absorption of all the others. So, you want to get it from food; that’s the form that nature has designed for us, and that’s the form that we’ve evolved with.
We can go further. The Chicago researchers looked at something that we never, ever thought about with Alzheimer’s disease: vegetables. Now, I’m going to make the assumption that vegetables are good for us; some people ate less than one serving of vegetables a day; some people had two or more servings a day. And, if I was to look at those two groups and say, “Who stays mentally clear as the years go by?,” the difference is dramatic. Look at this: If you’re avoiding the saturated fats, you’re avoiding the trans fats, if you’re getting your vitamin E from foods and you’re avoiding the metals, and you’re eating your vegetables, your likelihood of developing Alzheimer’s is cut by 60%. And the amount of benefit you’re going to get is going to be determined by how early you start.
In Seattle, researchers did autopsies on adults who had died at various ages. What they showed was that even in middle age, in your 30s and 40s, you can already start to see those changes in the brain that lead to Alzheimer’s disease, and the same dietary issues apply at that time. And the longer you stay with them, the more power they have. The question is: are you ready to take advantage of that? Is your family ready to take advantage of that? It can begin today.