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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.
...you get Alzheimer's. If you use artificial sweetener you get dementia. Either way you're fucked.
Isn't this something that has been reasonably well understood for some time?
For example, see here:-
http://neuro.hms.harvard.edu/h...
IIRC, the brain is pretty much the only organ in the body able to directly ingest and consume glucose from the blood stream; all the other parts of the body have to wait for glucose to be broken down into simpler compounds which they can then use. However, it's also been widely known that an overdose of glucose in the blood can be unhelpful/harmful. But it's one of the reason that people who conduct intellectually demanding work - i.e. work with a dependency on lots of cognitive processing - have a sweet tooth.
Maybe, but have you, for a counter example, seen Allan Savory's talks? That most of the world's land is unsuitable for agriculture, but it is suitable for grazing, and that's our place on the food chain, to eat the flesh of animals, who can graze and use their digestive systems to convert all that energy in ways we cannot do, with our small digestive systems. So in that model, it is actually grain that's the expensive food, it is just that industrialised petrochemical heavy farming made it look cheap, and ignores the externalities (god I hate that word) of bad health, and diabetes epidemics, which may bankrupt health systems. The human model is more like, some Massai guys wandering around with nothing more than goats. And assuming you are not in arid lands, those goats will eat anything.
I basically ate a lot of sugar for 20 years, so I think I am one of those people who, perhaps like you, can shunt all that sugar out of the bloodstream, in vast quantities.
But low blood sugar does not tell you how much insulin you had to produce to achieve that. And there's some thinking that high insulin is in itself damaging.
And eventually, when the ability to produce that insulin craps out, then the blood sugar goes up and the the doc will worry about pre-diabetes.
But that is so far down the road already, towards bad health, that it is a sort of double edged sword I guess -- low blood sugar looks great, but meanwhile, insulin resistance is creeping up on the body.
I have suffered with adult onset depression for 30 years. Last year a friend from HS talked me in to switching to a ketogenic (75% fat, 20% protein, 5% carb) diet. I was extremely skeptical but within a week the depression was gone! I started digging and found all sorts of peer reviewed research tying depression, dementia, and loss of cognitive function to a high carb diet yet I had never heard about it from any medical or nutritional professional. Most doctors have barely a cursory training in nutrition and that training is that fat kills! And it is WRONG! I've spent the last 6 months telling anybody who will listen. I am in better physical shape now than I've ever been and feel wonderful. I hope this message starts getting heard more.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K