Slashdot Mirror
Researchers Find More Evidence For the Strange Link Between Sugar and Alzheimer's (sciencealert.com)
schwit1 shares a report from ScienceAlert: People with high blood sugar stand to experience worse long-term cognitive decline than their healthy peers, even if they're not technically type 2 diabetic, new research suggests. The findings are not the first linking diabetes with impaired cognitive functions, but they're some of the clearest yet showing blood sugar isn't just a marker of our dietary health -- it's also a telling predictor of how our brains may cope as we get older. "Our findings suggest that interventions that delay diabetes onset, as well as management strategies for blood sugar control, might help alleviate the progression of subsequent cognitive decline over the long-term," explain the researchers, led by epidemiologist Wuxiang Xie from Imperial College London. The researchers sourced their data from the English Longitudinal Study of Aging, an ongoing assessment of the health of a representative sample of the English population aged 50 and older, which began in in 2002. For its analysis, the team tracked 5,189 participants -- 55 percent women, with an average age of 66 years -- assessing their level of cognitive function between 2004-2005 to 2014-2015, spanning several waves of the ELSA study. The findings are reported in the journal Diabetologia.
Learn to enjoy natural taste without added sweetness.
Right-- dump something into your body that your brain thinks is sweet. It dumps insulin. Your body says "WTF do I need that for?" and starts ignoring it.
Hello Insulin Resistance! You've got diabetes.
Instead, why not just cut back on how much high glycemic load foods you eat?
Also, headline misleading. People with high blood sugar have a link to Alzheimer's-- I drink normal Mt. Dew, and my blood sugar's been fine for 40 years.
It isn't too surprising, eating carbs is popular because societies that could grow them outcompeted those that couldn't. If you can feed your army grain then you're going to have a bigger better army than the guys eating venison and roots since your foodstuffs are more dense in calories and keep longer. Rationing during wartime comes to mind, too. But the carbs are really just the barest energy for your body, so if you skip them you're not missing out. For the counter example you can look up rabbit starvation, but that doesn't really apply in modern times since it is easy to get some fat or fruits or veggies, but shows a situation where having carbs would be a boon. Societies are shifting from keeping anyone from starving (where carbs are king, dollar for calorie what could compare? Perhaps insects?) to optimizing for health, which will lean towards more expensive foodstuffs.
Paleo may be nonsense, but if you avoid the crazies (and there are certainly no shortage of them) and just think of it as the "in general, foods that are less processed are better for you" diet, you're probably off to a good start.