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How healthy
is your Brain?
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Extracted and adapted from the Alzheimer's
Prevention Plan by Patrick Holford with Shane Heaton and Deborah Colson
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The Alzheimer's Prevention
Plan
Patrick Holford
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The Alzheimer's Prevention
Plan is based on cutting-edge research into nutritional medicine
from experts around the world. It contains a specially formulated
Alzheimer's prevention diet and a ten-step plan to enhance your
memory, which includes:
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A simple test
to discover your risks - and reverse it in eight weeks
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Memory-boosting
vitamins and minerals
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Essential fats
that help your brain think faster
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Simple lifestyle
changes and exercises to keep your mind young
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If your memory isn't as good as it used
to be, your concentration is flagging and your mind is not so sharp,
you may be another victim of a widespread epidemic of brain drain.
Officially called age-related
memory decline, far too many people are experiencing declining cognitive
function too early.
However, both memory loss, and Alzheimer's
disease are preventable.
| There are ten other short
questionnaires in the book, The Alzheimer's Prevention Plan,
including the Alzheimer's Risk Factor Check, four neurotransmitter
checks and four Essential Brain Foods Checks. |
Your brain can be your greatest friend
or your worst enemy. If it's working you have the ability to think clearly,
to imagine, to sense, to dream, to feel. It is your brain that makes
you who you are. If it's not working you can feel flat, unhappy, confused,
forgetful - life becomes a foggy struggle.
So, how is your brain
and what are you doing to keep it healthy?
Why is it that we service
our cars, keep our muscles and weight in trim, but do little to maintain
the health of our brain? More than any other organ of the body, the
health of your brain is the key to living a happy, fulfilling and pain-free
life.
This mere 3 pounds of
mainly fat and water is not only the most complex and mysterious part
of us, it also is the most regenerative, hardwiring a new neuronal connection
every minute, and the most energy-expensive. On a sedentary day your
brain will consume as much as 40% of all the calories you eat, thinking
an estimated 60,000 thoughts! More than any other organ of the body
it depends on a second by second supply of the right nutrients.
So, how is your brain?
Is it firing on all cylinders or is your mind less sharp and your memory
less reliable than it used to be? There are three ways to give your
brain an MOT.
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Psychological tests
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physical tests
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and chemical tests
Let's kick off with the psychological.
Many people, young and old, experience
memory and concentration problems. In Britain's largest every health
and diet survey, the Optimum Nutrition UK Survey (ONUK) published in
2004, we asked over 37,000 people questions such as those shown in column
2 in the mind and memory check. Here's what we found:
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52% of respondents suffer from anxiety
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46% report feeling depressed
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43% had difficulty concentrating and
felt confused
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38% felt nervous or hyperactive
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32% reported poor memory or difficulty
learning new things
Now check yourself out using the questionnaire
above. Are you worse or better than average? But who wants to be average
when you could be as sharp as a razor?
Often, a combination of supplements may
help in alleviating this condition. You may wish to consult a nutritional
therapist for personal advice. Supplements that may be helpful in alleviating
symptoms are shown below:
(please
also read this important notice concerning supplement medical claims)
Age-related memory decline
The fact that older people tend to have
higher scores doesn't mean it's all right to be 'average'. My goal for
you is to be better than average, and keep your mind, mood and memory
razor sharp throughout your life.
According to the drug
companies, there is an epidemic of age-related memory decline. "Age-associated
memory impairment affects many more people than Alzheimer's disease,
although, it's certainly true, it is a much less severe condition. We
believe at least 4 million people in the UK suffer from this," says
Dr Paul Williams from Glaxo pharmaceuticals, who have been researching
drugs to enhance memory and mental performance.
Age-related memory decline
or 'mild cognitive impairment', as it is often called, is a long way
off dementia or Alzheimer's and there is no guarantee that one will
lead to another. However, as you will see, these milder symptoms are
the first sign of potential problems later in life, and the
key to prevention is to
start early.
The ability of the brain
to make new brain cells and to make the 'neurotransmitter' messenger
chemicals that control your mood and memory depends on one critical
process. It's called methylation. Think of it like your brain's tool
box. There's a billion acts of methylation every second that can fix
damage, make more adrenalin, detoxify an 'anti-nutrient' or do any one
of hundreds of essential chemical balancing acts in the brain. And there
is one chemical in the blood, called homocysteine, which determines
how good you are at this methylation business.
Homocysteine is to your
brain like cholesterol is to your arteries. Your homocysteine level
predicts, more accurately than any other chemical measure, your risk
for memory, mood and concentration problems. If your level is high you
substantially increase your risk of dementia or Alzheimer's later in
life.
That's the bad news. The
good news is that you can rapidly reduce your homocysteine level, and
your risk, and test your homocysteine level using a simple home test
kit.
To understand methylation
we need to know a bit about body chemistry. You eat 10 tons of food
in your lifetime and, somehow, this turns into you. Your body is quite
literally a sea of chemicals, a hairy bag of salty soup concocted out
of millions of them, from glucose to fats, and amino acids to hormones
and neurotransmitters.
Methylation keeps your mind sharp.
Methylation happens a billion times a
second. It is like one big dance, with biochemicals passing methyl groups
from one partner to another.
Take noradrenalin. The
body produces this chemical to keep you happy and motivated. However,
if you are under stress, it adds a methyl group to noradrenalin to make
adrenalin, which gives you a burst of energy and aggression known as
the 'fight or flight syndrome'.
These methyl groups come
from the food you eat. When you eat, for example, a piece of fish containing
the amino acid methionine, it's incorporated into your bloodstream and
inside your cells and a methyl group is taken away from the methionine,
leaving you with homocysteine.
Ideally, the body adds
a different methyl group back to homocysteine to convert it into an
extraordinarily important chemical called S-adenosyl methionine (SAMe,
pronounced 'Sammy', for short). SAMe is a natural mind and mood booster.
This is because it can
readily give up its methyl group to help alter other body chemicals
and keep your brain in balance, or picking up other methyl groups.
If your level of homocysteine
is high this means you've got a log-jam in your body and brain's chemistry
and it means you've become a poor 'methylator'. As we shall see, this
is one of the main likely causes of Alzheimer's disease. Having a high
level of homocysteine is not only strongly associated with an increased
risk of Alzheimer's disease; it's also associated with declining memory
and mood in general.
The nutrients that improve
methylation, thereby lowering your homocysteine level, are vitamins
B6, B12, folic acid, as well as trimethylglycine (TMG), B2, zinc and
magnesium.
In summary, the brain
needs these nutrients:
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Vitamins (especially antioxidants
A, C and E and B vitamins)
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Minerals (especially zinc and magnesium)
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Essential fats (both omega 3 and 6
fatty acids)
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Phospholipids (especially phosphatidyl
choline and serine)
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Amino acids (found in protein)
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Glucose (evenly supplied in low 'GL'
carbohydrate foods)
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Oxygen (from breathing)
To make neurons and neurotransmitters
including:
And depends on methylation
to do it. For healthy methylation (to keep homocysteine levels low)
the brain needs:
The question is are you
getting enough from your diet to maximise your brain function and minimise
your risk? The chances are you are not. These nutrients not only keep
your brain working well, they keep it working fast. A healthy brain
of a young person processes a thought at a speed of 320 milliseconds,
roughly a third of a second. People with age-related memory decline
take 498 milliseconds, roughly half a second. Older people of a similar
age will take 396 milliseconds. So age appears to slow thinking, but
nothing like as much as those who have begun the disease process that
so often leads to Alzheimer's. On other measures of speed of processing
information, those with age-related memory decline or Alzheimer's showed
marked differences in mental processing speed.
Of course, it's not just
the speed of your mind, but also the ability to process and store memories
that counts, but it's amazing to think that the difference between a
healthy brain and that of a person with cognitive decline is a mere
100 milliseconds. That doesn't sound like much to lose. In chapter 9
you'll see how
a shortfall of DHA during pregnancy not only slows down a child's brain
speed at birth, but their brain is still thinking more slowly 6 or 8
years later! That's the effect of not getting enough of one single nutrient.
By the end of this book
you'll know exactly what you need to know to guarantee you are getting
an optimal supply of every single vital brain nutrient to keep your
brain thinking fast and working well. And we'll explore what goes wrong
in Alzheimer's and dementia, so you know why it's preventable and how
to prevent it.
In Chapter 17
Patrick Holford and his co-writers recommend the
Alzheimer's Prevention
Diet. The key principles
of this are:
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Eat essential
fats and phospholipids
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Eat slow-release
carbohydrates, and avoid refined ones
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Eat vitamin-,
mineral- and antioxidant-rich foods
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Eat enough
protein
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Avoid harmful
fats, refined carbohydrates, sugar and excess caffeine and alcohol
This is explained
in more details in the book in a simple to follow, point by point way.
Brain-boosting
supplements are described in detail in chapter 18.
Patrick recommends the following basic daily supplements
for everyone:
Added extras
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2 x homocysteine formula, if your Homocysteine
score is 6-9 (using the simple Homocysteine home blood test)
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4 x homocysteine formula, if your H score
is 9-15, or
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6 x homocysteine formula, if your H score
is above 15
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1 x antioxidant formula
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2 x brain-friendly nutrient formulas
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1 x tablespoon of lecithin granules, or a
heaped teaspoon of high-PC lecithin a day
Other optional extras (e.g. acetyl-L-carnitine,
lipoic acid, glutamine powder, niacin, ginkgo biloba or vinpocetine,
ginseng)
| Patrick Holford
BSc (Psych) Dip ION is a Director of the Mental Health Project
and a Clinical Director at the Brain Bio Centre in London. |
Note:
The information on this website is not a substitute for the personal
advice of a qualified medical professional.
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