Ian Blair Hamilton's HealtheMail
Alkaline Ionized water, its benefits and science and its stories
As my readers are aware, both Cassie and I are on a ketogenic diet, A.K.A. Alkaline Paleo Diet. We have a good friend in Chicago battling her own brain cancer on a ketogenic diet, recommended by her doctor.
This quite detailed video below is really worth persisting with.
I found this article on Joe Mercola’s site, even though Cassie and I have been also researching ti for a long time. Here’s the link to Dr Mercola’s quite excellent summary.
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.
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.
Dr. Steven Gundry is one of the top heart surgeons and researchers in the world. My friend Jimmy Moore is the most prolific blogger and podcaster on the paleo/low carb diet scene, with 250,000 followers. Here’s a link to an amazing interview between the two.
If you’re teetering on the edge of going Alkaline-Paleo, this is for you.
Just Breast cancer?
Hmm. what about underpants that detect prostate or testicular cancer?
A trendy chapeau that detects brain cancer. A scarf that detects throat cancer, or an undershirt that detects lung cancer?.. any other great ideas? or.. what about living a life that isn’t making you a statistic? Our friend Lillian Davenport is recovering from breast cancer with the assistance of her enlightened doctor, Tom Cowan who has followed his years of personal experience and recommended paleo diet rather than the usual virtually unworkable Gerson diet. So why don’t we know about the paleo diet and cancer?
Because – as usual – no studies have been done.. and as usual the ‘why’ is in the fact that the corps can’t make money from a diet.
It appears that we the people have to take our future health into our own hands, and a small investment in good research that creates outcomes for the people rather than the corporations is the way to go. Cassie found a great initiative put out by these folks to make it happen for the paleo diet. We’ve donated $100. Care to match us? With only a couple of thousand of like minded future-lovers we can achieve great things for all people.
Satiety is being ‘un-hungry’.
I’m talking about it because with the help of my life partner Cassie, it seems I’ve licked hunger pangs.
Travelling around Europe we have both been in situations where we missed the supermarket, didn’t travel with enough food, or had to keep on driving to make a schedule. And over and over again we’ve done it, easily, without hanger pangs.
I have to confess that over my whole adult life I’ve been the original ‘hungry ghost’ about food. Nice guy but don’t get between him and a plate of food at mealtime. Anger, shortness, insensitivity, bloodymindedness.. you name it, I could demonstrate it if I was hungry enough. And I was that hungry at least three times a day. At least.
I’ve been a healthy eater for at least 15 years. I was a vegetarian for almost that long. I have followed the alkaline diet for 12 years. But the change in my attitude to food is just one year old. And I firmly believe that it’s due to our change of diet from alkaline to alkaline-paleo. Instead of avoiding fats, especially saturated fats, we’ve done our research and make good saturated fats a large part of our diet. Instead of loading up on insulin-bouncing fructose laden fruit we regularly ensure adequate greens on a daily basis. Instead of that organic sourdough bread that used to play havoc with our gluten-intolerances, we eat NO GRAINS.
Weird? Only in an already weird world.
You know that feeling you get when you stand behind someone at the checkout and watch them spending hundreds of dollars on processed junk food? Go on, admit it, you feel smug. Well, I feel smug because my diet of adequate red meat, saturated healthy fats, vegetables, nuts, the occasional red or white has changed my life. And like you watching at the checkout I can now see that the whole world is as addicted to food in the form of grains and carbs as that person we smugly judged in the checkout. Just take a look around. This world is an eatathon. We get up, we eat our empty carb organic muesli. We grab our coffees and by ten we are ‘unsatiated’ so we snack to kill the hunger. At midday we get our hit of bread in the form of a salad roll, bread with a restaurant meal, bread wrapped around a burger.. By 2 we’re at it again and probably ease the tension with another ‘Joe’, or we go to our bottom desk drawer for a ‘healthy snack bar’ with dried fruits loaded with concentrated fructose. Before dinner it’s a beer or a wine, then we are at it again in our ‘main event’; dinner.
And the whole dang routine is determined by our lack of satiety.. and we think it’s NORMAL!
It goes further. There’s often an unwritten code between partners about food. The man of the family believes he needs more food that the woman. He complains if there’s ‘not enough food’ on his plate. The woman eats guiltily out of sight of the man. The kids just eat because the corporations – the men who made us fat, have learned that feeding people bigger serves make s more money, so they have trained kids to gorge on their offerings of empty carbs. Forget about vitamins and minerals; don’t waste your time arguing the relative merits of stone ground and sour dough. They are both addicting you, opening up your gut walls and flooding your body with undigested toxins. Vitamins and minerals don’t even figure in this equation because your digestion is probably so inefficient they’d never get digested anyway!
Here’s a few thought provokers for you in the form of a poll that you can see how you compare and whether I’m just off on my own trip..
Loading ... Loading ... Loading ... Loading ... Loading ... Loading ... Loading ... Loading ... Loading ... Loading ... Loading ... Loading ... Loading ...How many ‘Yeses’ did you score? Anything over five and I recommend you begin by reading ‘Wheat Belly‘
And if you’d like to learn more about what we eat, have a look at Cassie’s blog here
This sign in a zoo makes you think.. If it’s unhealthy for animals.. er… WHY would we think it is OK for us? Carbs in any form starve us and acidify us while apparently feeding us. How is that OK?
This may sound a little crazy.. but I’m used to people thinking me at least a little mad.
Cassie and I are both experiencing life more fully than we have for years. I’m talking about ‘full contact’ life; being right ‘in’ everything that’s happening to us and feeling both powerful and sometimes scared… and we both attribute this expanded consciousness to our new diet.
The Alkaline Paleo diet replicates the conditions we have evolved to live in.. and that’s not the diet we get fed every day. You can read more on Cassie’s blog here, but this is something quite unexpected. I am of the opinion that this new mind expansion is a direct result of the synergy that happens when our diet matches with our paleo blueprint. I don’t expect many people to believe this… because looking back, we always see the world through the eyes of the mind we have. I think the mind can only operate at a level of efficiency that relates to the ultimate health one may – or may not have – from one’s diet. It certainly appears true that people subsisting on fast food and acidic foods only have a higher level of brain fog, or inability to rise above the murk of pedestrian life.. so doesn’t it follow that the opposite would apply – and that seems to be what’s happening to us right now!
Over 50% of your brain is made of GOOD FAT.
Twenty percent of this good fat comes from EPA and DHA.
EPA and DHA can be accessed through:
* omega-3 fatty acids
* eating fish
* borage oil
* primrose oil
* parilla oil
Essential fatty acids provide the chemical molecules to make Phospholipids. These phospholipids gather together to form a protective barrier around each cell in your body. If the fatty acids are in phospholipid form, your body is able to use them quicker and more efficiently.
If you’re deficient in the essential fatty acids, we are told that you will be more susceptible to these conditions:
* Alzheimer’s disease
* Anxiety and body stress
* Heart disease
* Attention deficit disorder
* Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder
* Bipolar disorder
* Chronic fatigue syndrome
* Depression
* Learning disorders
* Memory impairment
* Parkinson’s disease
* Schizophrenia
Alzheimer’s
Doctors believe that if we all lived to be over 120 years, they would come down with Alzheimer’s disease. It is a disease that we all accept that once you have it, all you can do, is to slow its progression using certain drugs and nutrients. Before your brain starts to deteriorate to where it contains nodules of toxins, excess oxidation due to free radicals, and weaken and narrowing blood vessels, it might be a good idea to start feeding it the food it needs. As you already know, I’m feeding my brain daily with coconut oil and MCT (Medium Chain Triglycerides) Oil, and I’m drinking alkaline water to campaign against ongoing inflammation and oxidation, and I have my green drink every day.
DHA is in order for Alzheimer’s disease. With DHA deficiency in your diet, you can expect to have memory loss – and become depressed as you age.
Lecithin is also worthwhile. It helps to provide choline, a precursor to the memory neurotransmitter acetylcholine. It also provides the chemicals to produce RNA.
Heart disease is closely related to Alzheimer’s because the heart must be strong enough to pump plenty of blood into the brain and the arteries must open enough to circulate enough blood through the brain and throughout your body. Obviously a calcium-cholesterol constricted circulatory system is going to be a problem.
Even if you don’t succumb to Alzheimer’s or your family history doesn’t demonstrate it, most of us are in line for dementia. Dementia is also attributed to deterioration of brain cells and support tissue. One of the causes of dementia is a diet that has been deficient in the essential fatty acids.
Here is my own regimen for supplementing with the essential fatty acids:
* I eat more good fish, at least once a week and occasionally twice a week
* I eat up to 6 tablespoons of coc oil a day, plus three tablespoons of MCT Oil.
* I use olive oil on my salads.
* I eat meat. Plenty of meat, eggs, fish as I mentioned and occasional chicken: all grass fed (except the fish)
I understand that this may conflict with some people’s concepts of good diet, but believe me, it’s working for me. To learn more about my diet I’d suggest popping over to Cassie’s Alkaline Paleo Diet blog here
