The Startling Link Between Sugar and Alzheimer's

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/...heimers/551528/

Both of them have external regulation of insulin, for one thing. Once someone starts using insulin and following the 3 meals/2 snacks/minimum carb levels recommended by ADA, and using insulin to "cover," the resultant guesses and juggling seems to be very bad for the body.

They had that big study about "tight" glucose control with medications, and it was a disaster. Because they were trying to compensate for low fat/high carb. And you can't. Not without downstream effects.

Ive often thought about Alzheimers. I knew TWO tall trim women , one and two generations older, who died with Alzheimers.

Looks like living lc is the only way to prevent it.Reduce the insulin levels as much as possible.


I find this question stupid. As it shows little understanding of the life of a type 1 diabetic.

They are supplemented with insulin. My friend wears a pump. The more food she eats, the more insulin released. She's gained a number of excess pounds over the ten plus years Ive known her.

A constant slow release administration, and boluses. Surely that keeps her insulin elevated.

Anyone who’s been paying attention wouldn’t be startled by the link between sugar and Alzheimer,s.

The problem is what exactly people are paying attention to. If they're paying attention to what is constantly being pushed in our faces as a healthy diet, they'll find it hard to believe that the supposedly healthy low fat high carb diet they've been eating could possibly cause them any problems at all, much less something as devastating as dementia. Those of us on here take everything THEY say about healthy diet with several huge grains of salt - our N=1 shows that the claims of more energy and better weight loss on LF/HC just doesn't work, which automatically makes us all very skeptical of any other claims about the health effects of such a diet.

Unfortunately, the LC voice is still being shouted down by what's officially acceptable "research", and more people are paying attention to the louder voice. We see that all the time:

- Dr Atkins suffered a head injury when he slipped on ice, resulting in a coma, and his death - yet the story still persists that he was obese and died of a heart attack because of his supposedly dangerous diet.

- Dr Fettke was silenced for daring to advise his diabetic patients to eat LC, rather than just sit back and wait for them to need limb amputations. (at least that one ended up in favor of his right to advise his patients on diet, even though it still wasn't exactly a ringing endorsement of LC)

- More recently, a mouse study shows that mice only do well on keto for a week, so the news is shouting that means humans can't possibly do well on it more than a week either.

- The head of the ADA has just announced that by eating LC, she has her diabetes well under control and is already off all but one of her diabetes meds - it's only a matter of time before she's silenced, one way or another, whether it's the media silencing her, or the drug and carb peddling corporate partners of the ADA silencing her.


As long as the official word on diet is that you need to eat lots and lots of carbs to be healthy, and it's ok for diabetics to eat whatever carby junk they want, and just cover it with more insulin, there's going to be more people listening to that than there are people who realize what's really going on with diet, blood sugar, diabetes, insulin, and dementia/alzheimers.

They all have insulin - the T1's just have all of theirs injected, whereas the T2's have their own insulin, plus injected insulin.



I doubt that the T1's insulin levels are being kept low, certainly not ketogenic low, and not really LC-low either. A friend's little girl was diagnosed with T1 when she was about 5 or 6 years old (she's in her late 20's now), and at the time, I was appalled by how many carbs my friend was being told to feed her daughter - bread, crackers, potatoes, with only a little protein because of course she was told that her daughter still needed a minimum of 130 g of carbs daily for brain function. She was actually told that her daughter was allowed to eat cake, as long as the frosting was scraped off, which shows a total disconnect with the fact that the carb content of a piece of non-frosted cake is about twice as much as the carbs in the frosting they scraped off the cake -obviously because of fat phobia, because it sure wasn't in the interest of keeping her carb consumption low.


In another instance, I know of someone who's daughter was diagnosed as T1 when she was a little older. She was of course in the hospital to have her blood sugars stabilized because this newly diagnosed T1's blood sugars were totally out of control. But what did they feed her the entire time she was there? Hot dogs and hamburgers, served on buns, which was more carbs than she was being fed at home.


Little wonder than that in both cases, keeping the child's blood sugar under control was extremely difficult, especially the first couple of years when suddenly the pancreas would work again for a few hours or a day or two, and overdo it - it was a roller coaster ride. Her blood sugar would suddenly drop like a rock to dangerously low levels, then her blood sugar would suddenly rocket way up to 400, 600, or more, despite eating exactly what she was being told to eat, and injecting the "proper" amount of insulin for what she'd just eaten, so attempting to keep the numbers at a more reasonable level required additional insulin or glucose tablets to raise her blood sugar quickly. Or switching back and froth between both, if it didn't stabilize somewhere in an acceptable range (stabilized blood sugar for a T1 at this early stage is nothing at all like a normal blood sugar reading - getting it down somewhere below 200 was more than acceptable).

I don't know what's going on with the other little girl (lost contact with her a few years ago), but within a couple of years of the local little girl's diagnosis, she was put on an insulin pump, which did a better job of stabilizing blood sugars, but that's primarily because instead of injecting a large amount to cover all the excess carbs she'd eaten over the previous few hours, they cold enter the carb numbers into the pump programming every time she ate, and it would give her the right amount to cover that particular meal or snack. I haven't had as much contact with my friend since her daughter hit her teens, so I don't know for sure if she has one of the devices that senses blood sugar levels, and communicates with an insulin pump to keep blood sugars stable, but that would allow even more freedom to eat as many carbs as she wanted, resulting in even more insulin being injected.

The problem with treating any diabetic (even T1's) this way is that the more carbs they feel free to eat, allowing the pump to just cover them, the more likely the possibility of them starting to become insulin resistant, which means the pump will just give them more insulin to keep blood sugar down.



If the likelihood of developing dementia is related to insulin levels, it doesn't surprise me one bit if T1s are also more likely to get dementia.

Type 3 diabetes - diabetes of the brain.

Insulin and the brain

Abstract
Insulin performs unique functions within the CNS. Produced nearly exclusively by the pancreas, insulin crosses the blood-brain barrier (BBB) using a saturable transporter, affecting feeding and cognition through CNS mechanisms largely independent of glucose utilization. Whereas peripheral insulin acts primarily as a metabolic regulatory hormone, CNS insulin has an array of effects on brain that may more closely resemble the actions of the ancestral insulin molecule. Brain endothelial cells (BECs), the cells that form the vascular BBB and contain the transporter that translocates insulin from blood to brain, are themselves regulated by insulin. The insulin transporter is altered by physiological and pathological factors including hyperglycemia and the diabetic state. The latter can lead to BBB disruption. Pericytes, pluripotent cells in intimate contact with the BECs, protect the integrity of the BBB and its ability to transport insulin. Most of insulin's known actions within the CNS are mediated through two canonical pathways, the phosphoinositide-3 kinase (PI3)/Akt and Ras/mitogen activated kinase (MAPK) cascades. Resistance to insulin action within the CNS, sometimes referred to as diabetes mellitus type III, is associated with peripheral insulin resistance, but it is possible that variable hormonal resistance syndromes exist so that resistance at one tissue bed may be independent of that at others. CNS insulin resistance is associated with Alzheimer's disease, depression, and impaired baroreceptor gain in pregnancy. These aspects of CNS insulin action and the control of its entry by the BBB are likely only a small part of the story of insulin within the brain.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/228...and-back-again/

Thank you Demi for posting this link

The husband of a friend of mine has Alzheimer's and is being cared for at home.

Knowing that she is a researcher, I sent her your article.

This morning she responded by saying she and her husband were going on a low-carb diet immediately!

She shared that she too is showing symptoms

As an aside - she told me her dog was on insulin for his diabetes.So I sent her the review of Pottenger's cats and a reference to Billinghurst's raw diet for dogs and cats.

I have never met a convert who accepted low carb so quickly!

Thanks again.

You're welcome, and she may be interested in reading one of Dr. Mary T. Newport's books, Alzheimer's Disease: What If There Was a Cure?: The Story of Ketones or The Coconut Oil and Low-Carb Solution for Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and Other Diseases: A Guide to Using Diet and a High-Energy Food to Protect and Nourish the Brain.

Reading Chapter 5 (Brain Killer) in Dr. Catherine Shanahan's book Deep Nutrition , there may also be a startling link between vegetable oils and brain function / circulation / dementia / Alzheimer's.

Dr. Richard K Bernstein addressed the link between high/poorly controlled blood sugars and dementia in T1 diabetics in his low-carb book, Dr. Bernstein's Diabetes Solution.
That was back in 1997!

Wow. That does suggest how messed up blood sugar is working against the intricate functions of the brain.

And how the medical attitudes of "a pill for every ill" is terribly simplistic, and yet they ignore downstream results. Side effects is just an excuse for another pill!

Thanks, I will send her that too

It was chapter 8: