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Why do we have collective cognitive dissonance about Alzheimers’?

January 26, 2013 by Leave a Comment

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

Stephanie Seneff
Rm G-438 MIT Stata Center
32 Vassar Street 
Cambridge, MA 02139 USA
seneff@csail.mit.edu

 

  • 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)

 

Filed Under: Alzheimers, Coconut Oil, Italy on Alkaline Paleo, Low carb, low carbohydrate diet, Paleo, Uncategorized

‘Sangue’ means rare = or is it ‘raw’ in Spain?

October 2, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Did I eat it? Yes. Did I enjoy it? Believe it or not it was amazing.

Filed Under: Alkaline Paleo Diet, Italy on Alkaline Paleo

Am I a Victim Because I Can’t Eat Wheat, Sugar and Lots of Carbs?

June 23, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Can’t we ever eat like a ‘normal person’ again and be healthy?

“Why can’t I just eat  like a normal person?”  is a frequent cry I hear from my fellow sufferers.

Eating like a ‘normal person’ in this era of such a high carbohydrate and  processed diet cannot be sustained by most people without they also sooner or later succumbing to disease.   Perhaps  to want to eat ‘normally’ is like saying why can’t I smoke and stay healthy?

It has become quite obvious to me that when I mention that wheat should be taken out of every person’s diet as  it is actually poisonous that people just go blank.  I think this is because wheat has such a hold on us that it is incomprehensible to our wheat addicted minds that we could ever take it out of our diet.  It’s just part of everything we eat.  We can’t go anywhere without being confronted with food made from wheat.

It doesn’t matter what nationality people  I talk to.  Wheat is ubiquitously found it’s way to all cultures in a big way, even Asia, home of rice.

Cheap but nasty

The lovely Heidi, a women in Italy I am staying with is getting a bit wider every year I see her.  She is a very aware and loving person but mention that wheat might  be a good thing to give up and she has up to now ignored me.  Her new American partner, Mark, is diabetic.   Diabetes can be reversed by taking high carb food out of the diet but they eat carbs…. breakfast muesli with chocolate bits and fresh cherries, lunch always has large quantities of pasta, rice or potatoes and dinner is mostly the same.   They eat some lettuce and other veges everyday which we grow in the garden but vegetables don’t play a large part in her diet.  Neither does meat.  She isn’t vegetarian but she is a frugal buyer and meat it’s true is more expensive than pasta.  They also snack on dark chocolate.

The trouble with skimping on good food is that you pay and you pay in the way your body works.

The other problem is you will eat a hell of lot more empty carbohydrate fillers, firstly because wheat does make us more hungry, and secondly because our bodies are trying to get more nutrients from these foods  which  just can’t supply it.

So food may be cheaper but nutrient density wise are they really so cheap?

What Ian and I are eating in Italy

Here in Italy Ian and I each eat  a bacon rasher, 2 eggs, 1 medium mushroom and 4 tiny tomatoes cooked in coconut oil  with some rocket for breakfast.  We are totally satisfied with this.  For lunch we have a large salad with home grown lettuce, tomatoes, celery, cucumber, olives, rocket and a small amount of salted anchovies and sometimes some prosciutto.  This is covered with a dressing of olive oil, salt and lemon juice.  Yummy.  Again totally satisfying.  For dinner a medium sized bit of meat and above ground vegetables cooked in different ways. Sometimes we might feel like a snack and we eat some nuts, not a lot but it’s a good snack.  Totally filling, nutrient dense and not a lot of food when you look at it compared to a large nutrient empty pasta dish.

Oh yes, that’s right Heidi has fruit trees with the most unbelievable tasting cherries, peaches and apricots.  They are nothing like the fruit at home.  We have eaten some of this fruit (blush).   The good thing about these trees though is that they bear for about two weeks and then they are over.  No more fruit till next year!  This is how it is in nature, no year long supply and this is how it should be for us, just a short window of fruit eating opportunity.

Heidi says she could never be full on what we eat.  She told me last year she had tried the low carbohydrate diet and it wasn’t right for her. It’s obviously not going to be right for anyone who sees wheat as a staple that cannot be given up.  This  is the addictive nature of wheat.

So wheat, even though our guts might complain bitterly we will still ingest a food not only nutritionally pretty empty, addictive, makes us more hungry, feeds bad bacteria in our guts, brings our glucose levels up like sugar does (see Dr William Davis “Wheat Belly”)  actually causes the gut wall to become leaky because of the Zonulin hormone it releases in the gut and can damage the gut villi due to the gluten contained within it.  

Hmm..what else?  Oh yes there is a high concentration of phytates in wheat, actually in all grains, which are called antinutrients because they actually stop the absorption of minerals into the body.  

 

Wheat out does us humans in intelligence

Am I still a victim because I can’t eat like a ‘normal person?  I have great respect for the power of wheat, after all it’s managed to make it’s way all over the world into everyone’s food and people can’t stop eating it.  Perhaps it’s the most intelligent species on earth, not us?

Oh and yes, is whole wheat different to refined wheat?  That is an absolute no, whole wheat or not it’s still doing all those nasty things to the body.

 The multitudes of health defects from wheat eating

Study on zonulin:  www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21248165

Filed Under: addiction, Alkaline Paleo Diet, Candida albicans, Gut dysbiosis, Italy on Alkaline Paleo, Leaky Gut, Wheat Tagged With: , , ,

Do We Want to Truly Heal Just Yet?

June 18, 2012 by Leave a Comment

My logical mind leaves the room

Some people are just not ready to heal yet,  I know, in some moments, I’m still one of these people.  When tempted by foods I shouldn’t eat I still occasionally become unconscious (the “me” that has logic and reasoning has left the room!) and I  tell myself I can eat those foods and when I do, I sabotage my healing.

In the last 15 or so years I became aware to some extent that I was holding onto some pattern to remain sick,  but I just couldn’t, for the life of me, connect to or feel what that pattern was.  How could I understand something I couldn’t feel or sense at all? How can anyone?  This pattern was coming from my unconscious  mind.

I looked at how I would feel if I was truly well and could do the things I thought I wanted to do.  Mostly my goal for getting well was to be able to eat all the food I used to eat again and this was my strongest motivating force for years!

Am I passionless or just plain scared?

I asked myself if I was using my sickness so I didn’t have to find out if I really could create and be passionate about something in my life.  The answer I  got was a probable yes, I wasn’t really prepared to confront my lack of passion to do anything.  I really thought I didn’t have any passion for any worldly projects,  I have since found I was completely wrong about this.

One thing I was and still am passionate  about is self awareness, which is just as well as it has slowly led me to understand the mechanisms inside myself that have kept me where I have been – sick.

A victim of my own anger

This unrevealed pattern  has taken a fair bit of time to  reveal itself.   Over this  time of unravelling  I have gradually dropped being a victim of my sickness. I stopped getting angry and depressed and started coming to terms with the fact I was indeed sick. I realised I had become a victim of my own persecution of myself and I was angry and depressed that I couldn’t get well.

Dealing with guilt

Another thing I had to deal with was guilt.   My partner Ian had to (in my words) put up with me and my complaining and my lack of contribution.  It was hard  because he worried about me when I complained but if I didn’t he would want me to do lots of things I just wasn’t capable of.  I tried to find a way to tell him I wasn’t feeling well enough without him becoming concerned but this turned out to be impossible.  I realised I just had to deal with his worry about me but this has not been at all easy.

Depression was really anger

What I started to realise is that when I was depressed I would become aware that in fact I was angry, and with this awareness I sat in and  allowed my anger.  This shift in the way I handled my depression caused me to begin to be  a lot more gentle with myself.  The fact was,  I was sick and there were times when I had no energy and I wasn’t capable of doing all the things I believed I should be doing.

This gentleness that arose from my acceptance has been  I believe the beginning of the unravelling of my pattern. The gentleness allowed more space within me to clearly and gently look at myself.

Oh my goodness am I good at sabotage!

Next came something I would have never believed I could do at the time but never underestimate sabotage!  I had been doing really well on this program.  I had been on it for a year and was starting to get great signs of healing and then I travelled to Italy.  I  ate some Italian sour dough bread and felt well and lost my ability to think.  My diet went to hell in a hand basket!  After six months of eating and drinking in Italy my health packed up and left!

I have had some serious work to do to get healthy again and it hasn’t been fast or easy!  You see  I had really not come to terms with the fact I could never eat like I used to again.

The dawning of self kindness

After this sojourn, it slowly, slowly dawned on me  that if indeed I wanted  health, and indeed great health,  I would need be being really kind to myself and not eat these high carb foods at all.

I’m maybe carbohydrate intolerant?

Dr Jay has been Low Carb, High Fat for 9 years

Dr Jay Wortman  (who did a study on the Canadian Eskimos and made a movie of it  using the LCHF diet called My Big Fat Diet) told me  that  I was probably carbohydrate intolerant.  What this meant was that I would never be one of the ‘normal’ food eaters again.  I don’t think I truly let this understanding in all at once.  It came little my little, by studying more of what it meant for the health of  ’normal’ people to eat the ‘normal’ foods.  ’Normal’ people don’t do well on the same foods I could no longer eat and understanding this was like turning up the lights in a very dim room.

With the understanding  that I would probably never be able to eat all the foods I used to eat came a  grieving process with lots of bargaining and denial, just like when you have lost someone you love!

Denial and bargaining – the grieving process

I see this denial and bargaining happening to so many people with ill health.  My friend Gerry, who is a MD, says most people will not give up the habits which are making them sick and this frustrates him so much.

In a strange way because I was so obviously sick and because I badly wanted to be well I was lucky.  Ian, my husband, believed he was healthy like so many other people do, until the day it all fell apart when he  found out he  bad osteoporosis.

People say to me now as they are getting a bit older ” I found out I have cancer!” or “I have been diagnosed with arthritis!”  And add indignantly,  ”I cannot understand it, I have been so healthy my whole life!”

Is it true that these people have been healthy their whole life till now?  Certainly outwardly they seem to have been fortunate, then why has this sickness “all of a sudden’ happened”?  The truth is that for Ian there were always signs of something that was not quite right in his body but these signs were ignored, they couldn’t be possibly be real because of his conviction he was healthy and there was nothing that his body could  tell him that could help him to understand all wasn’t quite as it seemed.

Passion for life replaces passion for eating bread

My motivating force for getting well  has now truly changed, in fact getting healthy has been really only a sideline of the great event of discovering what my subconscious mind was trying to hide from me.  I truly now see myself as empowered towards something far greater than just being able to eat what everyone else can eat.  I have found my passion, even though it still at times it runs away and hides for a bit when I get scared.  I want to help people, I adore helping and this is what this blog is for.

Is ‘normal’ what I want?

So a ‘normal’ diet is not for me and in truth most of us do not want to hear that it’s not good for any of us.
Eating high carbohydrate along with high acidity foods will lead to ill health even in the most ‘healthy’ people.s.  I have done enough research and observation of people around the world to see that the  ’normal’ diet will lead all people to ill health.

Unpacking the box of the unconscious mind

Join me in this great adventure of discovering the wonders and passion that are here within us when we start to unpack the box of our subconscious mind.

 

Filed Under: Alkaline Paleo Diet, Italy on Alkaline Paleo, low carbohydrate diet, Travel, Unconscious mind Tagged With: , ,

Italian Odyssey- Part 2

June 13, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Jeepers have I been having some adventures here in Italy and now the UK.

I now really know how hard it is to eat travelling if you can’t afford to eat at a restaurant and can’t cook for yourself.

I have just visited my nephew in London and his girlfriend, Lili.   They live what is probably a typical London life in the sense they don’t cook.  They eat only organic foods but the organic foods they tend to mostly eat are organic snack foods. They aren’t vegetarian but I guess for them meat is not really an ethical substance to eat, so there is little meat eating going on.

This fast food chain in London is considered to have healthy food but all foods (except a salad) are bread based

As a result I noticed Lili needed to snack very frequently as her blood sugar levels started to drop.  Her breakfast of  porridge or muesli with oat milk sustained her for, at most, 2 hours then she needed another carbohydrate food fix.  Jonathan, my nephew commented that when they were on holiday away from home, Lili’s main priority was where her next two meals were coming from.

My nephew did, bless his cotton socks, try to do the diet last year, but he had friends who stayed who were ‘great cooks’ so he ate what they cooked.  Who wouldn’t at age 32 or even 52?  Except of course for someone who is rather health challenged and absolutely sick of being sick.

Everywhere I looked in London cafes there was only (except for a salad which only the hardy would choose on a cold summers day!) bread based snacks to eat.  What hope has the average Londoner out and about have?

On the flight to London I looked at the menu offerings interested to see if there was anything that wasn’t bread based and that wasn’t just junk food (like chips).  Not a thing.  Ian and I had bought some pistachios with us and our own water filter bottle so the airline didn’t get any more revenue from us.

When Lilli mentioned to me very quietly that she needed to snack a lot, I said it was because she wasn’t getting  much protein or fats from the foods she eats so she will become hungry often.  She also mentioned she had a chronic sore throat and I suggested to try eliminating some foods to see if  they might be the culprit, as in my experience it usually is.   She told me a friend did a weeks fast and that had fixed her so maybe that’s is all she needed to do.  Maybe it might work short term, but I doubt it very much.

I watched Jonathan opening and closing the fridge often to see if there is something in there to tempt him.  This is exactly what I used to do, looking in the fridge for something to satisfy a craving, but what is the craving?  I think it was probably for protein and fats.

I offered to cook Jonathan the same breakfast that Ian and I had every morning and I noticed after he had eaten this meal he did not snack or indeed didn’t  eat till dinnertime.

Back here in Italy,with my friend Heidi and her partner Mark, there is a continuous snacking also on carbohydrate foods.  Mark is a diabetic as is eating a high carbohydrate diet so of course he needs to frequently snack on these foods.  Diabetics (also now referred to a carbohydrate intolerance) are diabetics BECAUSE of the high carb food they eat, with the end result of insulin resistance, being from your bodies attempts to manage carbs.

Heidi looks at our lunch when we dine together, and says there is no way she would be full enough eating what we eat.

I understand the addiction so well and this is why it becomes so hard to even try to change people’s mind.  Only when the pain is enough, and for some this never eventuates, even with the verdict of cancer in fact.   Just like someone with lung cancer who continues to smoke we couldn’t dream of life without our our high carbohydrate foods.

 

 

Filed Under: Alkaline Paleo Diet, Dining Out, High fat diet, Italy on Alkaline Paleo, low carbohydrate diet, Travel, Wheat