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Researchers Find More Evidence For the Strange Link Between Sugar and Alzheimer's (sciencealert.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the cognitive-decline dept.

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.

21 of 99 comments (clear)

  1. Re:If you eat sugar... by religionofpeas · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Learn to enjoy natural taste without added sweetness.

  2. No shit Sherlock by niittyniemi · · Score: 5, Informative

    This is little more than confirmation of what was already known:

    Diabetes damages your vascular system. Even if your blood glucose control is excellent, you will still get periods when your BG goes high and your blood vessels will get deposits on their walls and hence restrict supply of oxygenated blood to the tissues that require it.

    The results are systemic. If you don't get enough oxygen to tissues that need it, they will die. That includes not only the well recognised bits that get damaged by diabetes: retinas, kidneys, feet etc. but stuff that most medics don't recognise: the rest of your body including your brain.

    I speak with some experience: I'm an insulin-dependent diabetic. I've got a loss of feeling in my feet although my retinas are still reasonable.

    Yet there must be ongoing damage to the fine vasculature in my nut. My experience of living with people who have dementia is that the effects are insidious and you don't initially notice it. It's effects have an exponential progress, IMO.

    I'm 55 now but I reckon within 10 years, I'll be too bonkers to put finger to keyboard. I hope to die before then.

    --
    The Machine stops.
    1. Re:No shit Sherlock by Bongo · · Score: 4, Informative

      There's quite a few people out there, from various scientists to doctors to members of the public, doing some form or low carb, paleo, primal, and even zero carb, and finding that they thrive on it (yes very controversial as it means public health advice for last 30 years has been wrong, but that's progress).

      Basically, don't eat sugar, or stuff that turns to sugar, and body does not then have to deal with damage from sugar.

      Recently I have gone zero carb [1] and I just cannot get my head around how my body simply had no need for any sugar or carbs at all.
      Naturally people have to experiment for themselves to see if this is also true for them.
      Get a blood glucose meter, and wake up feeling fine on say, 4.0 mmol/l or 72 mg/dl

      [1] More or less, there is the odd gram of a carb in cream cheese and so on.

    2. Re:No shit Sherlock by Harold+Halloway · · Score: 2

      It didn't say 'inextricably linked,' merely noted a probability. A single, personal anecdote cannot be used to counter a large, long-term study like this.

    3. Re:No shit Sherlock by Gilgaron · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

    4. Re:No shit Sherlock by Bongo · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

    5. Re:No shit Sherlock by Bongo · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

    6. Re:No shit Sherlock by Bongo · · Score: 2

      True, and I agree it would be a mistake to try turn it into simple minded notions like, paleo man did not drink tea so we do not drink tea. Rather, it is simply a hint about, well, if a food is relatively new, we might not be adapted to eat it, or maybe as it happens it’s fine anyway. We can already see today that different populations seem more or less susceptible to various problems. So, generally, there is the broad view that for 2 million years we developed on meat, and ten thousand years ago we started agriculture, and today different populations seem adapted in various ways. But today’s Westen diet is yet another big change, and there’s a hint in this coinciding with epidemics of obesity and diabetes.

    7. Re:No shit Sherlock by Moridineas · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

    8. Re:No shit Sherlock by kaybee · · Score: 2

      You are generally correct, however it does vary from person to person. The reality is that nobody needs to consume carbohydrates. Unlike fats and proteins there is no such thing as an essential carbohydrate. Yet everybody can handle carbohydrates in moderation. What "moderation" means depends on the person. For some that can be a bunch, for others it can be pretty small.

      Some good indicators that you eat too much carbohydrates: obesity, hypertension, heart disease, Type 2 Diabetes.

    9. Re:No shit Sherlock by ArhcAngel · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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
    10. Re:No shit Sherlock by Zorro · · Score: 2

      Say hello to the best food for you in the world, THE EGG!

      Turns out the experts were just as wrong about eggs as they were about trans-fats.

      And eggs aren't even expensive or hard too cook.

    11. Re:No shit Sherlock by Baavgai · · Score: 2

      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.

      No exactly. Type 2, the kind everyone has who was actually born with a functioning pancreas has, is not a failure to produce insulin so much as a failure to process it. It is called insulin resistance. There is actually so much insulin being pumped out that the liver gives up and the insulin receptors become less receptive. In response to this, the pancreas pumps out more insulin and you get a nasty feedback loop.

  3. Re:If you eat sugar... by geekmux · · Score: 2, Informative

    "...you get Alzheimer's. If you use artificial sweetener you get dementia. Either way you're fucked."

    Just get Stevia, it's not sugar and also not artificial. Sweet.

    It's sweet, until the Sugar Mafia steps in and provides "irrefutable" evidence through many "sponsored" studies that proves Stevia causes smartphone addiction and IBS.

    Never put anything past Greed.

  4. Re:If you eat sugar... by Megol · · Score: 2

    I'd say bitter. Really don't like the taste of stevia.

    Stevia is natural* as is cyanide and strychnine. IOW not relevant.
    Stevia is actually the sweetener used today that have most experimental evidence of being potentially dangerous, this is why it was only relatively recently declared as safe enough for general use in the US and the EU (and a lot of other countries).

    (* not what is sold though - it's a purified extraction often done with methanol** as a solvent)
    (** that isn't bad in itself but "natural" types often freak out when "artificial" sweeteners have any type of relation to methanol)

  5. Re:If you eat sugar... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  6. Already Well Known? by ytene · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  7. Re:If you eat sugar... by Gilgaron · · Score: 2

    That's been my experience. I used to have my blood sugar crash on me sometimes, and it stopped once I stopped eating or drinking anything with artificial sweeteners. Full calorie yogurt instead of light stopped me wanting to snack between lunch and dinner. If I want to treat myself to a soda I just have a real one and don't worry about the calories since I only have a few a week.

  8. Re:Blood sugar by religionofpeas · · Score: 2

    The high blood sugar is usually the result of high dietary sugar.

  9. Re:If you eat sugar... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Learn to enjoy natural taste without added sweetness.

    This is the best advise (and the best way to enjoy any "taste").

    As a Greek Orthodox Christian i have the great opportunity to fast frequently every year, and in few days the most important (and longest) fasting period starts, lasting 7 weeks - while basically it is required to abstain only* from meat, fish, dairy, animal/vegetable-fat/oil, alcohol, personally in the last decade i do it like certain monks: i abstain also from salt and sugar (or any kind of added sweetener). After the first few days (of... "God damned you Jesus... " - yes, i am still a slave of the Devil...) i rediscover the natural taste of so many things that i bury under salt/sugar.

    From what i know, i believe that most/all Protestants don't fast - i think they really miss a great way to (physically) "taste God". The same applies to people of no religion also.

    * it is required to abstain also from spiritual sins... the hard part of fasting...

  10. Re:Blood sugar by kaybee · · Score: 2

    Eating lots of sugar and carbs is a huge factor in becoming a type 2 diabetic, which then means your body isn't able to regular blood sugar as effectively.

    Additionally, even in a healthy person, eating sugar causes spikes in blood sugar level. Your body corrects for it quickly but it almost certainly causes more damage than somebody who avoids eating sugar.