The Alzheimer's Antidote: Can we prevent Type 3 Diabetes? | Amy Berger

chronically high insulin is a major risk factor for Alzheimer's regardless of what genes you have okay so we are here with Amy Berger the author of the Alzheimer's antidote Amy could you introduce yourself real quick sure um my name is Amy Berger I am a low carbon keto friendly nutritionist and I'm a writer so I'm the author of the book the Alzheimer's antidote and I blog at 2:00 at nutrition calm that's tea uit nutrition calm and I think I'm mostly known as a blogger but I do see individual clients I'm a private nutritionist and so I do consultations so this is a very thorough book explaining the some of the complex mechanisms behind the development of Alzheimer's and it's very interesting but what was the impetus or what was the motivation to begin writing this right well so some of your viewers might know the book good calories bad calories by Gary Taubes it's a fabulous book it's the first place that I ever heard about a possible connection between glucose insulin and Alzheimer's disease and at the time I read the book I wasn't really that fascinated by it I found it interesting but I have no family history of Alzheimer's so I just tucked it away in the back of my mind like oh that's interesting you know maybe someday I'll look into that more and it was four years later I went to graduate school for nutrition and I had to pick a thesis topic and I said you know what what is something I could learn about that hasn't already been written about a million times and is something that I would actually learn about and something that I would want to learn about so I said I'm gonna go back to that Alzheimer's thing and see if there is even enough in the medical literature that I could do a thesis so my thesis wasn't an original experiment it was like a research review so just even in my preliminary search of like PubMed and the medical you know literature and journals like I don't even know if anyone has researched this enough that I could write a paper about it well when I just even started looking I was overwhelmed with papers on this topic it's actually everywhere it's all over the scientific literature that they call Alzheimer's disease type 3 diabetes or diabetes of the brain and so the book came out of my thesis that was my graduate thesis was on this topic and using a ketogenic diet as a nutritional therapy for Alzheimer's and when I graduated I couldn't imagine keeping this to myself I thought I have to share this with people I really sincerely believe that this is life-saving information so it's either gonna sit on my laptop and no one's ever gonna know about it or I can find a way to get it into the world so I the I mean the book is much expanded my thesis was a 30 page paper this is a much more expanded much more detailed version but that's where this came from let's start what the common conception of Alzheimer's is I think usually it's just thought of oh you know it's well it's in your genetics you might get it you might not and if you get it that's unfortunate what was the your your before you started your research what did you think Alzheimer's was I honestly didn't know a whole lot about it at all I don't have a family history of it I mean as far as I knew it was that disease where you just lose your memory and I didn't even really know a whole lot beyond you just lose your memory I mean it's so much more than that so many other cognitive things happened your whole personality changes your behavior changes so there's a lot more but all I knew was that it was like memory loss and it happens to old people you know and it's definitely both of those are incorrect but that's that's all I know so in your book you describe Alzheimer disease you say at its heart Alzheimer's disease is a fuel shortage in the brain what does that mean so yeah I would say Alzheimer's is a fuel shortage or an energy crisis in the brain and the where that comes from is that the major problem in the brain of somebody with Alzheimer's is that neurons in affected parts of the brain lose the energy to effectively metabolize glucose so they're basically starving they're starving for energy they're withering they're shrinking you can see the volume of the brain shrinking on an MRI you can see that it's smaller and all that comes because the brain is starved for fuel and the brain is what we call an energy intensive organ it's um it only accounts for about two percent of an adult's body weight but it uses between 20 and 25 percent of all the glucose and oxygen so the brain you you cannot have an interrupted fuel supply to the brain or you're gonna be in major trouble okay and I remember yesterday you said that the that it can be up to 45% less utilization of glucose which is pretty significant if you're requiring 25 percent of the body's needs so how does it how does that develop like how does arrived at that situation that's a really good question and we honestly don't know I mean what is actually the primary or fundamental cause of this we don't know we do know that that's what the problem is it's it's a reduced usage of glucose in the brain we don't know why so how someone arrives at that it certainly happens over time you know I mentioned in my talk that nobody wakes up all of a sudden with severe Alzheimer's this starts in a very mild form they call it mild cognitive impairment and it worsens and worsens over time until you have full-blown Alzheimer's so it really starts out mildly to the point where somebody just maybe every now and then you forget a word you forget somebody's name you know people that do a lot of math in their profession like accountants and CPAs find that they have trouble calculating things in their head as quickly as normal so it's like little things but it gets worse and worse over time until in the end stages you can't even you know you might forget your spouses maybe you don't even recognize your children and you can't care for you you have to have other people bathe you and feed you I mean it's it's you regress to like an infant like state it's very devastating and not just to the person that's affected the whole family is affected it's not just one person that has to live with this disease it's the whole family really I think some people who might be a little bit more into this topic they might have heard of amyloid plaque and they might be saying oh yeah maybe it's the amyloid plaque that is like choking the neurons and so they can't get the glucose is that accurate or is it not and could you comment on that it is accurate but the implications are not what we're normally told about this amyloid stuff so I don't know how much time we have to get at the detail but amyloid or beta amyloid is this protein that the neurons secrete that even healthy people's brains secrete this it's not specific to Alzheimer's the problem in Alzheimer's that these proteins are not cleared away properly so that when they're secreted they just build up and build up and form these infamous plaques and these amyloid plaques do get in the way if you look at the way neurons communicate with each other these synapses these amyloid plaques build up outside the cell and they do block neuronal communication that's true but the the amyloid proteins are being secreted for a reason you know the body doesn't just do stuff for no reason let's just secrete these proteins to cause Alzheimer's that sounds like a good idea no I these proteins there's more and more so a lot of people think that these proteins cause Alzheimer's for several reasons the blockage of synopsis included but there's more and more research and there's a whole other school of thought that is showing more and more that these amyloid proteins are actually protective they're a defense mechanism they're being secreted as a reparative restorative type of thing but the problem is still that they are building up and so the question is why are they building up I don't know if I should go down that road just yet but you know they're they're building up I'll just leave it at the fact that they're not being cleared away properly and that's the issue with Alzheimer's not that these proteins exist but that they're not being cleared away so that they're left to build up and latch on to each other and form these plaques is there let's see I could put this is there a kind of type of person with a type of lifestyle and this type of lifestyle usually correlates with more amyloid plaque so that's a good question and I don't know if I can say there's specific lifestyle factors that are known to increase the plaque I can say for sure though that there's something called the apoe4 gene which is the strongest known genetic risk factor for this disease people so we have two copies of each gene one from our mother one from our father people that have one copy of this apoe4 gene are at increased risk for Alzheimer's people with two copies are at super-super substantially increased risk and the people with efore tend to have the most amyloid buildup in their brains Wow okay so the people at the highest risk about how how much higher is it so with with apoe4 if you are homozygous meaning of two copies of this gene it's um you have about a fifty to ninety percent chance of developing Alzheimer's that's how strong this risk factor is ninety but is a risk factor that doesn't mean it causes Alzheimer's it means you have an increased susceptibility to it so whatever is causing Alzheimer's you will be more sensitive to those factors if you have this yes okay okay and then just jumping back to what you said at the start about how it's been described as type 3 diabetes so I guess the logical step would be okay you get type 2 diabetes and then you progress into type 3 diabetes is that accurate partly but not fully so having type 2 diabetes is a risk factor for Alzheimer's or cognitive decline so you are at increased risk to to have dementia later in life if you're a type 2 diabetic but not everybody with type 2 diabetes will develop Alzheimer's and not everyone who has Alzheimer's had or has type 2 diabetes so the thing is when we talk about type 2 diabetes we only ever talk about blood sugar blood glucose they never look at insulin so there's a lot of people walking around right now with totally normal blood sugar but if the blood sugar is only normal because it's being kept in check by sky-high insulin and in a lot of modern illnesses what we call non communicable diseases meaning not something you can catch like a cold or a flu not something at Aegis some kind of chronic illness that's not like like type-2 diabetes like obesity PCOS cardiovascular disease non-contagious illnesses so many of these are driven by chronically high insulin even when blood sugar is normal so you can get any of those things whether it's hypertension PCOS gout like all these things that are driven by high insulin even when people's sugar is normal and the same is true for Alzheimer's chronically high insulin is a major risk factor for Alzheimer's regardless of what genes you have so on the topic of insulin what is it that degrades the amyloid plaque what would what clears it out you're saying that was one of the issues that's not getting cleared up funny you should ask yeah this is really one of the one of the most shocking things I came across in my research on this is that these right remember I said these plot these amyloid proteins are not really a problem even healthy brain secrete them the problem is in Alzheimer's they build up they're not cleared away properly there's an enzyme that clears this stuff away and it's called insulin degrading enzyme I mean how weird is that so this enzyme IDE until integrating enzyme has more than one target that it works on these amyl these beta amyloid is one of its targets insulin is another of its targets and the thing is enzymes have different affinities on different sort of like favored favoritism for one target one substrate over another and the favorite of this enzyme is insulin the affinity of this enzyme for insulin is so high that is long as there's a lot of insulin swimming around the bloodstream this enzyme is so busy going after all the insulin that it's going to ignore and neglect all of its other targets including the spate of amyloid and they know in people that have hyperinsulinemia who have chronically high insulin levels they have more beta amyloid buildup yeah I remember I was watching one of your talks online and when I first heard that and I just like that that is incredible I have to interview this it's stunning I mean I'm still it still kind of blows my mind and I've been reading about this for like five years it still blows my mind we were talking about Emily Planck seems to be kind of choking the neurons ability to utilize glucose is there a mechanism around that that you can talk about yeah so I do think there is a physical aspect to it that these plaques do build up outside the cell and they actually block synapses they block neuronal signal transmission but biochemically so I I'm gonna get a little nerdy hopefully the audience is not gonna be bored here but this amyloid inhibits an enzyme called pyruvate dehydrogenase and this enzyme pyruvate dehydrogenase is the connection between glycolysis and the Krebs cycle so it's two ways to produce energy from glucose we convert glucose to pyruvate through the process of glycolysis and then we convert pyruvate to acetyl co a which then gets burned gets oxidized for energy to produce energy through the Krebs cycle and pyruvate dehydrogenase is the connection between those two and beta-amyloid puts the brakes on this enzyme so again okay Wow this is a slam dunk against amyloid this is if if Alzheimer's is a glucose metabolism problem in the brain an amyloid is inhibiting the metabolism of glucose then that looks like a clear-cut problem there except that in a lot of Alzheimer's patients they don't even have a lot of build-up of amyloid you can have so it's it's just like the e for the a belief or gene you can have the e for genes and not develop Alzheimer's and clearly millions of people that have Alzheimer's don't have the e for gene it's the same deal with this amyloid you can have Alzheimer's disease without a lot of plaque buildup in the brain and you can have a lot of plaque buildup in the brain and not have Alzheimer's so we can't pin everything on this amyloid if not everyone who has Alzheimer's even has a lot of this plaque so in inhibiting I I think I mentioned before there's a new school of thought that thinks that these amyloid proteins are protective and we also see a lot of amyloid secreted and traumatic brain injury and CTE it's chronic traumatic encephalopathy or a chronic like head injury concoction yeah yeah did I say concussion concussion oh you have a chronic um you know low-level head injury brain injury and we see it there for the same reason because it's protective it's trying to help the neurons it's trying to like regenerate renew things and in my opinion and this is speculation but when you look at the mechanism because again the brain isn't secreting the stuff or nothing it's not secreting it to kill us it's not secreting us to steal our minds in inhibiting this enzyme if if the neurons and the cells are already so damaged from decades upon decades of the constant what I would call nutritional insult nutritional assault from ceaseless influx of glucose refined carbs and garbage food then the cells in the mitochondria where we produce energy are already so damaged that secreting the amyloid may be their way of shutting off the glucose spigot like no I'm already so hurt and so damaged I'm not gonna even allow you to metabolize any more glucose I can't like I'm good you're gonna kill me so it shuts off the glucose flow and you know not to biochem no doubt but this glucose instead of being used for energy is shunted toward something called the pentose phosphate pathway which is another biochemical pathway by which certain compounds are produced that can help these neurons restore and regenerate so I I think this this amyloid is it looks very protective to me and and every time we try to get rid of it people get worse there's been multiple pharmaceutical drugs developed now to reduce the formation of these proteins and plaques and every single one of them has totally failed now they do they succeed in that they actually do reduce the formation of the proteins and plaques but those reductions have never had any you know improvement in the disease that you get rid of the amyloid and everybody still gets worse when people's talk about an Alzheimer's drug it's usually an amyloid plaque drug okay it's always an anti-amyloid drug in the same way that you know I'm sure your viewers are familiar with the cholesterol thing the cholesterol story where you know statin drugs do reduce cholesterol they do but having a lower cholesterol doesn't guarantee freedom from heart disease or heart attack it's the same way with the amyloid these anti-amyloid drugs do reduce amyloid that doesn't do anything to improve Alzheimer's so what do you do you have less amyloid just like with a statin whoop-dee-doo my cholesterol is lower I still had a heart attack I still lost my mind I mean you know and I'm not a cardiologist please forgive me there may be some patient populations for whom a statin is appropriate I'm not saying they're always bad but more and more even some cardiologists are saying okay statins are helpful but it's some other mechanism other than lowering LDL so on that note of cholesterol in your book you have a chapter the cholesterol the bane the brains best friend could you not to give the whole chapter away but could you comment on that real quick yeah so the you cannot have healthy cognitive function without cholesterol end of sentence period the brain contains about 25% of all the cholesterol in your whole body the brain is loaded with cholesterol every single neuron every single piece of my land every single mitochondrial membrane you need cholesterol and they've done you know Studies over and over and over again that show people with higher cholesterol especially later in life as they get older have better cognitive function you just can't you can't have a proper brain function without cholesterol like I just can't do it yeah I don't know what else to say any cholesterol it's not this thing it's not the scary thing we've been led to believe every single cell membrane in your body has cholesterol in it your liver produces more cholesterol than you could ever eat from eggs and butter and shellfish and red meat and again the liver isn't producing cholesterol to kill us and to clog our arteries it's just like the the brain isn't producing amyloid to kill us this stuff is there for a reason now to to ramp back to the initial question that I had we're asking you about why Alzheimer's diseases it feels short it's in your explaining how the uptake of glucose is severely limited but you know we've been taught that the brain has to run on glucose it sounds like it's kind of a doomed situation what can we do well so it is a doomed situation if the brain doesn't have any alternative fuel supply so think of the brain like a hybrid car the brain runs on glucose but that doesn't mean it can only run on glucose the brain so we know the scientific community knows most of your viewers probably know that the brain can run beautifully on ketones there's this other alternative fuel source that the brain can run on I I have never heard nor have I seen that ketones can replace fuel a hundred percent for the brain I've seen up to sixty percent you know depending on how high the ketone level is depending on the individuals metabolic state when you're in a very deep state of ketosis with very high ketones not ketoacidosis high but normal physiologically nutritional ketosis high that ketones can substitute for up to 60% of the brain's energy maybe 80% if I I might be recalling from a study I don't know if it's ever been shown that it can replace glucose 100% so you need some glucose at least as far as we know but ketones can at least compensate they can fill that gap somewhat maybe even if you can't fill it all the way you can feed and nourish these otherwise starving cells and even if there's still a little gap how much more cognitive improvement would somebody have from having like little to no fuel to at least some you know and that's one of the most promising encouraging things in the Alzheimer's research in my opinion is that even though these neurons are not metabolizing glucose properly they can still take up and metabolize ketones and they've shown this in human beings not just in mice and rats and petri dishes but in living humans with Alzheimer's disease that when you get their ketones elevated they do have improved cognition that sounds very promising and because you were saying the glucose uptake could be impeded by as much as 45% yet ketones can supply as much as 60% of the of the fuel there you go and they did they did a rat study this I don't think they've shown us in humans yet but in in in rats they've shown or a rat model of Alzheimer's they've shown that when you elevate the ketones I think sometimes these studies are done with exogenous ketones sometimes it's with the diet I don't remember which one this was I think it was the diet but I could be wrong but it was a rat model not humans but they had elevated ketones and not only was ketone metabolism in the brain like up regulated they also had improved glucose metabolism in the brain and I so I don't know if that happens in humans but it's almost like a double win it's like a win-win situation if you can fix both of those yeah I think now that we brought up the ketogenic diet people not too familiar with it with that or low carb to think you know ok now I gotta buy MCT oil and I got a I don't know buy new keto bars and make fat bombs and stuff does it have to be that complicated no it doesn't but it depends on the goal you know that the type of ketogenic diet that you need depends on what you're trying to accomplish somebody with Alzheimer's has a different goal than a 22 year old guy who's ripped and is doing CrossFit or you know then someone who's 40 and just wants to protect their long-term health look very different goals very different metabolic situations most people who were using low-carb Aikido to you know improve their blood sugar improve insulin sensitivity have better energy clear their skin get rid of their acid reflux you don't need any of that fancy stuff all you really need to do is keep your total carbohydrate intake low enough to transition your body from running on carbs and glucose over to running on fat and so what makes that metabolic switch happen is the absence of carbs not loading up on MCT oil loading up on coconut oil loading up on fat you can do that if you want but don't blame me when you don't lose weight or um you know in the case of Alzheimer's so I want to be specific in the case of Alzheimer's if you have somebody who's very elderly or is very severely impaired you're not going to be able to get that person to do a ketogenic diet I mean we have to be real being a caregiver in this situation is really difficult by itself let alone trying to force her love want to do things they don't want to do follow this diet they don't want to do in those cases if somebody is unable or unwilling to do a ketogenic diet in in the specific case of Alzheimer's where the main goal is to feed these starving brain cells then get the ketone levels off any way you can so I would encourage the use of exogenous ketones or MCT oil or coconut oil and it's again it's not that you can't use those in the other scenarios but but in in those metabolic situations type 2 diabetes PCOS gal you know hypertension all this stuff what makes low-carb Akito effective for those is not the high ketones it's the lower blood sugar and insulin and that comes from the low carbs not from high ketones so it's just a little different different application of this diet depending on what you're trying to do okay I think that's a really good note and I guess this is what you're talking about in chapter 10 right in part 2 of your book it says carbohydrates start starching not non starchy and not as complex as anything yeah I mean because not not everybody needs to be on a ketogenic diet you know I I would classify myself as low-carb I bounced in and out of ketosis pretty regularly just because I don't eat a lot of carbs but every now and then I'm gonna have something starchy or something sweeter um so I but I don't have a medical necessity to be in ketosis all the time but I don't eat pasta like I'm never gonna have pancakes in serum for breakfast again you know maybe once no but you know I mean I don't I don't deliberately aim to be in ketosis it's not everybody needs to this I mean there's plenty of people even doing a Paleo diet that are doing great their lean they're healthy they're active they have energy so you know they're not eating tons and tons of garbage carbs all day but they might be eating fruit they might be eating some starchy vegetables so everybody's carb tolerance everybody's insulin sensitivity differs you know I don't think everyone needs to be eating 300 grams of carbs a day but not everybody needs to live at like 20 to 30 grams a day strictly ptosis all the time I think that's a that's a great message for people are hearing like oh I heard the keto diets 80% like I can't have carrot or like don't if I can leave the viewers with anything don't let anybody be your keto police don't let anyone food shame you don't let anyone ever tell you the phrase that's not keto if you have half a carrot shredded on your salad well carrots are on keto you really half a carrot is gonna be the difference between me becoming diabetic and not like can we please be a little rational about this I mean I think that's an excellent point to end on is there somewhere I can direct everyone to check out your car yeah so my book is the Alzheimer's antidote you can find that on Amazon or my website my website is - at nutrition calm tea uit nutrition calm and I just started a YouTube channel of the same name - it nutrition and I'm very active on Twitter or my handle is - at nutrition okay

Channel: What I've Learned

Views: 202,035

Rating: 4.9210696 out of 5

Keywords: amy berger, alzheimer's disease, insulin, glucose, keto, ketogenic, low carb diet, dementia, cognitive, interview, low carb high fat, insulin resistance, type 2 diabetes, type 3 diabetes, health, brain, mct oil, what i've learned, brain fog, type 2, low carb, insulin sensitivity, neuroscience, the alzheimer's antidote, fasting, hypometabolism, brain metabolism, ketones, ketogenic diet, nutrition, jason fung, metabolism, how to prevent alzheimer's, how to treat alzheimer's, alzheimers, amyloid

Id: f-A2rIA2OTE

Length: 24min 50sec (1490 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 05 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/rrroqitsci]

Dr. Rhonda Patrick did an interview with Dr. Dale Bredesen on this subject. It’s a must listen, if you’re into biochemistry. If not, still Listen to it.

[u/ncolloz]

I needed this, absolutely amazing!

[u/Xanderp711]

Powerful stuff