Protect Your Brain From Cognitive Decline

The brain is made of 60% fat. It actually is the fattiest organ of the body. The foods you eat DO affect how your brain will function ans well as repair itself from the body’s daily abuses and detoxing of it’s wastes.

Blood sugar does not have a good effect on the brain. (One does not have to be diabetic to have high blood sugar.)  Thus, high blood sugar triggers a reaction called “glycation”. Simply put, glycation is a biological process whereby the glucose, proteins, and certian fats bind together and causing the body’s tissues and cells including those in the brain to become stiff and hardened.  This process called AGEs or Advanced-Glycation-End-Products; which is a contributing factor to the aging process.

This protein stiffness has been linked to inflammation and chronic diseases; such as Alzheimer’s, diabetes, and cardiovascular disese. More importantly, these sugar molecules and brain proteins combine to create deadly new structures contributing more than any other factor to the degeneration of the brain and its functioning. The brain is extremely sensitive to the glycating devastating effects of glucose, because it is this glucose that can accelerate the damage. In other words, glycation can contribute to the shrinking of critical brain tissue.

If one is insulin resistant, this person’s body may not be able to break down a protein (amyloid) that forms plaques associated with brain disease. Also high blood sugar induces threatening biological reactions which injure the body by producing certian oxygen containg molecules; damaging cells and causing inflammation, thus, resulting in hardening and narrowing of the arteries in the brain as well as other areas in the body.  This condition (Atherosclerosis), leading to vascular dementia, which happens when blockages and strokes kill the brain tissue.

A most disturbing finding was made by Japanese researchers in 2011, when they looked at 1,000 men and women over 60 years of age, and found that “people with diabetes were twice as likely as the other study participants to develop Alzheimers’ disease within 15 years”.
Excerpt from Grain Brain, by  Dr. David Perlmutter…  Resources