APOE-4:
The Clue to Why Low Fat Diet and Statinsmay Cause Alzheimer’s

Dr. Stephanie Seneff has written an amazing piece on the role of fats and chlolesterol’s necessity for a healthy brain, pointing out the lack of same in Alzheimers’ victims.

She also talks about ApoE-4, a gene integrally  involved in the transport of fats and cholesterol to the brain.

Since ApoE plays a critical role in the transport of cholesterol and fats to the brain, it can be hypothesized that insufficient fat and cholesterol in the brain play a critical role in the disease process.  Testing your self for the existence of the gene can show whether you have a higher risk of AZ. Recently, it was found that Alzheimers’ patients have only 1/6 of the concentration of free fatty acids in their cerebrospinal fluid compared to individuals without Alzheimers’. In parallel studies, it is becoming very clear that cholesterol is pervasive in the brain, and that it plays a critical role both in nerve transport in the synapse and in maintaining the health of the myelin sheath coating nerve fibers. An extremely high-fat (ketogenic) diet has been found to improve cognitive ability in Alzheimers’ patients.

Stephanie’s observations have lead her to conclude that both a low-fat diet and statin drug treatment increase susceptibility to Alzheimers’.

When I read her article (which, I warn you, is a full scientific study) I recalled our recent experience in Italy. As you probably know, I have suffered from early onset Alzheimers’, and thanks to my partner and wife, Cassie, found coconut oil and MCT oil which has slowed the pace of my ailment hugely. These days I’m doing very well.. as long as I keep up the fats in the form of coco oil, which in turn maintains my state of ketosis.

However, that’s not my story. When we flew to Italy for our ‘long service leave’ of six months, we stacked as much coconut oil into our luggage. Six litres of this very heavy oil doesn’t leave much room for anything else, and six litres at the rate of consumption I was used to here meant that I was out of the good oil in a bit over a month. Our experience of being ‘off the oil’ before this time (I went off it to see what happened) was that I would begin to have the symptoms again in as short as a week. Word recall loss, disorientation, smashing things… all the sort of symptoms I had had before.

This time I didn’t get worse. I remained sharp. What was different?

One big thing. We had come to Italy with the express agreed ‘rule’ that while here we would consume no sugar (gelati) and no carbs. (Pasta) In Trattorie we would ignore the lovely sourdough bread they brought to the table, and we’d also ignore the Primi Piatti, or first course which was always ‘con pasta‘. We would ask for olive oil and drizzle it on our mains that usually consisted of meat or chicken, usually, in the Italian style, less lean and more fatty than here. We bought local grassfed  (high Vitamin K2) beef, rabbit and turkey and ate all the fat.

So our diet was strict paleo. Plenty of sat-fats, small but adequate amounts of protein, eggs from the farm we stayed on, and lots of the many variations of spinaci the Italians seem to specialise in. No pane (bread) no pasta, no grains of any sort.

And my Alzheimers’ did NOT deteriorate. (despite our wayward excursions into local red wine)

Reading this article is well worthwhile for anyone dealing with AZ. Because of our video, which has been viewed over 120,000 times, we hear from many people with similar situations. Most are carers of older parents, and their major dilemma is getting the older parent to consume coco oil. One further problem we have recognised is the tendency of AZ people to crave sugar, the very poison that’s assisting their decline. Most people of 60+ are long term carb addicts, and this addiction combined with their AZ symptoms has causes many of our correspondents to despair of helping them. We’re now looking at a new possibility; that diet that is the opposite of the low cholesterol low fat SAD recommended diet, may actually contribute more to their healing than all the drugs we see being used.

No, I can’t prove it and yes, as Jimmy Moore says of his n=1 experiment with a full ketonic diet, I am only one.

A final thought: Alzheimers’ is poised to destroy the American health support network. It’s not going to go away, and the amount of money required to support even one AZ victim is needed until they die. The economic and the social cost of this epidemic is beyond comprehension and government’s can’t deal with it and stay in office, so don’t expect anything to change.. But here’s the thing. What if my tiny n=1 example is for real? It means that all the fast food vendors, all the government dieticians, all the policy makers.. all those thousands of vested interests in cheap carb-based diets supported with expensive statin-based drugs.. they, who we are told are the ones who ‘know’ what is best for us, are either plain wrong or plain culpable.

Here’s the link to her article

Dr Stephanie Seneff is a Senior Research Scientist in the Computer Science and Artficial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT. She received the B.S. degree in Biophysics from MIT in 1968, the M.S. and E.E. degrees in Electrical Engineering in 1980, and the PhD degree in Electrical Engineering in 1985, also from MIT. Her research interests have encompassed many aspects of the development of computer conversational systems, including speech recognition, natural language parsing, discourse and dialogue modelling, language generation, and information summarization. She has published nearly 200 refereed articles on these subjects, and has been invited to give keynote speeches at several international conferences. She has also supervised numerous Master’s and PhD theses at MIT. She has served on the Speech Technical Committee for the IEEE Society for Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing, and is a member of the Editorial Board for the Speech Communication Journal. She has also served as a member of the Permanent Council for the International Conference on Spoken Language Systems (ICSLP). She is an ISCA Fellow.

Dr. Seneff has recently become interested in the effect of drugs and diet on health and nutrition, and she has presented talks on these subjects at various workshops and written several essays on the web articulating her view. A blending of biology with dialogue systems is reflected in her recent efforts in developing spoken dialogue systems to allow users to search health-related grass-roots provided information from the Web.

Together with collaborators, Dr. Seneff has published 9 articles in the medical and biochemistry research literature since 2011 on her novel ideas regarding environmental toxins, metabolism, and modern diseases. She proposes that a low-micronutrient, high-carbohydrate diet contributes to the metabolic syndrome and to Alzheimer’s disease, and that sulfur deficiency, environmental toxins, and insufficient sunlight exposure to the skin play an important role in many modern conditions and diseases, including heart disease, diabetes, gastrointestinal problems, and autism.

Contact Information

• Papers on Nutrition and Disease
  

Note: Entropy is an Open Access journal that is willing to publish novel hypotheses regarding biochemical and biophysical phenomena, which can help the community break out of its current straitjacketed research paradigm. The papers below, many of which were published in Entropy’s Special Issue on Biosemiotic Entropy: Disorder, Disease, and Mortality, cover several topics relating environmental toxins to disease, as well as the revolutionary concept that endothelial nitric oxide synthase (eNOS) synthesizes sulfate as well as nitric oxide. The papers were subjected to rigorous review by experts who were not beholden to industry influence. These papers collectively explain how widespread cholesterol sulfate deficiency throughout the body is behind most modern diseases and conditions.

1. Stephanie Seneff, Ann Lauritzen, Robert Davidson and Laurie Lentz-Marino, “Is Encephalopathy a Mechanism to Renew Sulfate in Autism?” Entropy 2013, 15, 372-406; doi:10.3390/e15010372 (Download)
2. Stephanie Seneff, Ann Lauritzen, Robert Davidson and Laurie Lentz-Marino, “Is Endothelial Nitric Oxide Synthase a Moonlighting Protein Whose Day Job is Cholesterol Sulfate Synthesis? Implications for Cholesterol Transport, Diabetes and Cardiovascular Disease.” Entropy 2012, 14, 2492-2530; doi:10.3390/e14122492 (Download)
3. Stephanie Seneff, Robert M. Davidson and Jingjing Liu, “Is Cholesterol Sulfate Deficiency a Common Factor in Preeclampsia, Autism, and Pernicious Anemia?” Entropy 2012, 14, 2265-2290; doi:10.3390/e14112265 (Download)
4. Samantha Hartzell and Stephanie Seneff, “Impaired Sulfate Metabolism and Epigenetics: Is There a Link in Autism?” Entropy 2012, 14, 1953-1977; doi:10.3390/e14101953 (Download)
5. Stephanie Seneff, Robert M. Davidson, and Jingjing Liu, “Empirical Data Confirm Autism Symptoms Related to Aluminum and Acetaminophen Exposure,” Entropy 2012, 14, 2227-2253; doi:10.3390/e14112227(Download)
6. Robert M. Davidson, and Stephanie Seneff, “The Initial Common Pathway of Inflammation, Disease, and Sudden Death,” Entropy 2012, 14, 1399-1442; doi:10.3390/e14081399 (Download)
7. Stephanie Seneff, Glyn Wainwright, and Luca Mascitelli, “Nutrition and Alzheimer’s Disease: The Detrimental Role of a High Carbohydrate Diet,” European Journal of Internal Medicine 22 (2011) 134-140; doi:10.1016/j.ejim.2010.12.017 (Download)
8. Stephanie Seneff, Glyn Wainwright, and Luca Mascitelli, “Is the Metabolic Syndrome Caused by a High Fructose, and Relatively Low Fat, Low Cholesterol Diet?” Archives of Medical Science, 2011; 7, 1: 8-20; doi:10.5114/aoms.2011.20598 (Download)
9. Stephanie Seneff, Robert Davidson, and Luca Mascitelli, “Might cholesterol sulfate deficiency contribute to the development of autistic spectrum disorder?” Medical Hypotheses, 8, 213-217, 2012. (Download)