How To Lower Your Risk Of Getting Alzheimer’s Disease

TGIF guys,
I hope your week has gone well. I want to share with you an article on the role of diet and its effect on our ability to enjoy a qualitative life. This subject is very dear to me because my mom is in the advanced stages of Alzheimer’s Disease. One of my reasons for changing my dietary habits (see January 10, 2008 blog) has to do with witnessing the effect Alzheimer’s Disease has on my mom and family. This disease is a very slow, progressive illness where your loved one gradually loses mental functions and capacities and slips away from you.

It is painful to watch at times, but what I have garnered from being an observer is that you learn to treasure your memories, and enjoy the now. I thank God every time I can still get a smile from her or a brief remembrance and utterance of my name or one of my siblings. I treasure the present as well and my mom’s satisfaction in having her hair combed or in eating her favorite- raspberry and lime sherbet.

The good news is that advances in medicine, diet and exercise can ward off the effects of this disease. Take a moment and read this USA TODAY article below and find out how you can stay healthy, lower your risk of being affected by this disease and be a Winner at life!

Stay Blessed!
Joyce

Diet Link To Alzheimer's Deepens
By Kathleen Fackelmann, USA TODAY

A vegetable stir-fry and a glass of red wine might go a long way toward preventing the formation of the brain gunk that can lead to Alzheimer's disease, studies report Monday.

The findings involving experiments with mice add to an increasing body of evidence, including human studies, that suggest the high-fat Western-style diet might lead not just to heart attacks but also to Alzheimer's, a disease expected to afflict up to 16 million people in the USA by 2050.

But if new research by Narayan Bhat of the Medical University of South Carolina and others pans out, Americans might be able to change that future in part by steering clear of artery-clogging foods.

Bhat took healthy lab mice and fed them a diet with lots of saturated fat and cholesterol. After two months, he gave the mice, which were middle-aged by then, a memory test and found that those fed the bad diet flunked: They made errors finding their way around a water maze.

Mice eating the bad diet also had an increase in a toxic brain protein called beta amyloid, Bhat says. Many scientists believe that beta amyloid deposits in the brain lead to the symptoms of Alzheimer's.

Bhat presented the results on Sunday at the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting in Atlanta. The findings raise the hope that a diet low in saturated fat might prevent that build-up of beta amyloid — and Alzheimer's disease.

A study posted online this month suggests just that: The report in the Archives of Neurology found that people eating a Mediterranean-style diet — low in saturated-fat animal products and high in fruits, vegetables and whole grains — had a lower risk of Alzheimer's than people eating standard American fare.

Italians and others who live around the Mediterranean often drink red wine with dinner, and a second study at the neuroscience meeting adds to evidence suggesting that something in red wine or grapes might offer protection against Alzheimer's.

Giulio Pasinetti of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York gave mice that had been genetically altered to develop Alzheimer's a small dose of red wine every day for 11 months. Then Pasinetti gave a memory test to the wine-fed mice and a control group that received no wine.

The Alzheimer's mice that were given no wine faltered on the test. But the mice that had been drinking small amounts of Cabernet Sauvignon found their way around the maze surely and swiftly, a sign that they still had a sharp memory, Pasinetti says.

Alcohol consumption can cause many health problems. So people who already drink should limit their consumption to about a single glass of red a day, Pasinetti says. And don't expect wine or any other single food to compensate for a diet that has lots of unhealthful fat, says P. Murali Doraiswamy, an Alzheimer's expert at Duke University: "You can't wash down a double cheeseburger with a glass of red and expect to get a brain benefit."

http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2006-10-15-alzheimers-diet_x.htm
Copyright 2008 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.