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Root cause of Alzheimer's may be fat buildup in brain cells, research suggests

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141–150 of 205 posts

Re: Root cause of Alzheimer's may be fat buildup in brain cells, research suggests

#141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of them?

Why would this be shocking?

I wouldn't call it metabolic if parts were missing or otherwise had communication malfunctions without any issue in acquiring/using energy itself.

But I'm sure lots of things go wrong when the brain doesn't get the energy it needs and is forced to compensate.

Even more to the point: If something generalizes without a qualifier like most/many/some/can be, there might be an implicit "all/every" (or careless communication) and that makes it all suspect.

Re: Root cause of Alzheimer's may be fat buildup in brain cells, research suggests

#142
post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

High fat and protein is keto right? What's so dangerous?

Ketosis is probably our rudimentary "wintersleep mode". Rudimentary as we are basically tropical animals (look at our lack of fur). We should not eat for ketosis. But we can eat (restricted to fat and protein) and still stay in ketosis, which is marketed as the keto diet and is not well tested in long term studies. You are a guinea pig when you do this long term.

>You are a guinea pig when you do this long term.

As opposed to being reliably obese? What's your baseline? I recently checked the average weight of men and women and I am honestly shocked.

Re: Root cause of Alzheimer's may be fat buildup in brain cells, research suggests

#143
post #123

As a former Alzheimer's researcher, this is a big fucking deal. It puts together a lot of clues (APOE risk, microglia) and finds a theory that makes a lot of sense. All around the world, there are labs pulling late nights trying to figure out how to drug this.

Silly question, but could this be aided by simply reducing body fat down to extremely low levels?

No. The brain is about 60% fat. It’s not about having fat in your brain, it’s about having AND amyloid plaques AND fat in specific locations AND probably a whole host of other factors.

Does eating healthy food instead of highly saturated fats provide health benefits? Yes. Does having too low levels of body fat lead to health problems? Also yes.

Re: Root cause of Alzheimer's may be fat buildup in brain cells, research suggests

#144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honest question: how? I've never seen anyone who's obese and having a diet that made me go "huh that's odd how can they be obese?" While the inverse occasionally has been true, generally people who I consider in good shape appear to eat less, and less greasy food. So while there might be exceptions it seems to be a damn good rule of thumb to me.

> I've never seen anyone who's obese and having a diet that made me go "huh that's odd how can they be obese?" Are they eating fat _or sugar?_ The body will aggressively squirrel away any unused sugar as fat. As one example, a Big Mac contains 7g of _added_ sugar. Fries? Coated in dextrose. Sugar is added to damn-near everything.

"Starch and glucose efficiently stimulate insulin secretion, and that accelerates the disposition of glucose, activating its conversion to glycogen and fat, as well as its oxidation. Fructose inhibits the stimulation of insulin by glucose, so this means that eating ordinary sugar, sucrose (a disaccharide, consisting of glucose and fructose), in place of starch, will reduce the tendency to store fat. Eating “complex carbohydrates,” rather than sugars, is a reasonable way to promote obesity. Eating starch, by increasing insulin and lowering the blood sugar, stimulates the appetite, causing a person to eat more, so the effect on fat production becomes much larger than when equal amounts of sugar and starch are eaten" From https://raypeat.com/articles/articles/glycemia.shtml

Re: Root cause of Alzheimer's may be fat buildup in brain cells, research suggests

#145
post #8

My aunt started showing symptoms of Alzheimer's. My grandfather passed from it. Is there any thing to do in order to prevent or delay the disease?

> My aunt started showing symptoms of Alzheimer's. My grandfather passed from it. Is there any thing to do in order to prevent or delay the disease? Similar to ASCVD it takes decades to manifest and lots of the traditionally healthy lifestyle activities help delay or prevent it (diet, sleep, exercise). Unfortunately once someone is showing symptoms it's very late in the game.

I try to follow that lifestyle and push my mom and dad to it, they both workout and exercise. I don't think they work their brain that much though. I've been pushing them to take a course or something like that.

Re: Root cause of Alzheimer's may be fat buildup in brain cells, research suggests

#146
post #139
post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No they wouldn’t stay lean. If you fed someone more calories than their body uses to maintain its current weight, they would get fat eventually. Regardless of whether they eat carbs, fat or protein.

You're so wrong. With only protein and fat, they would not be able to gain much weight. I've tried to gain weight on low carb/high fat, and it doesn't work. I was uncomfortably full after every meal. My tracking showed a significant calorie surplus, but my body wasn't absorbing it. Adding in more carbs made a huge difference. Hormones tell your body when to store fat.

Did you know that bodybuilders in the 1950's(before anabolic steroids) used the egg and steak diet before contests as cutting diet to get lean? They would eat, as the name suggests, large quantities of steak and eggs with butter and have a carb refeeding day every 4 days. They would get really lean on a very high-calorie diet, think 4000 to 6000 calories.

The inventor of diet famously lost a contest for being too lean.

Re: Root cause of Alzheimer's may be fat buildup in brain cells, research suggests

#147
post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ketosis is probably our rudimentary "wintersleep mode". Rudimentary as we are basically tropical animals (look at our lack of fur). We should not eat for ketosis. But we can eat (restricted to fat and protein) and still stay in ketosis, which is marketed as the keto diet and is not well tested in long term studies. You are a guinea pig when you do this long term.

>You are a guinea pig when you do this long term. As opposed to being reliably obese? What's your baseline? I recently checked the average weight of men and women and I am honestly shocked.

Short term you can lose weight with ketosis. Long term you are taking unknown risks.

The risks of obesity are well known. Also, you do not get obese by lack of a keto diet. One usually gets there with a rubbish diet.

Re: Root cause of Alzheimer's may be fat buildup in brain cells, research suggests

#148
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The matched subjects who ate meat (including poultry and fish) were more than twice as likely to become demented as their vegetarian counterparts (relative risk 2.18, p = 0.065) and the discrepancy was further widened (relative risk 2.99, p = 0.048) when past meat consumption was taken into account https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8327020/

That's a small observational study from 1993, with p>.05 outside of the subgroup analysis. Whatever search strategy led you to it is severely flawed.

is this better? https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10517714

Re: Root cause of Alzheimer's may be fat buildup in brain cells, research suggests

#150
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What kind of fat is it? Like is it possible to avoid by avoiding too much fat?

The idea that eating fat leads to higher body fat is the most dangerously-wrong health misconception in history.

We've probably done more harm with the similar, and also incorrect, assumption that eating more saturated fats go directly to the blood and clog arteries.
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