Episode 15 – Preventing Alzheimer’s and Cognitive Decline with Amy Berger

My guest today is Amy Berger. Amy is a certified nutrition specialist with a masters in human nutrition, and is the author of the book The Alzheimer’s Antidote: using a low carb, high fat diet to fight Alzheimer’s disease, memory loss, and cognitive decline. Like many others, Amy struggled for years to lose weight on […]

The post Episode 15 – Preventing Alzheimer’s and Cognitive Decline with Amy Berger appeared first on Deskbound.

My guest today is Amy Berger. Amy is a certified nutrition specialist with a masters in human nutrition, and is the author of the book The Alzheimer’s Antidote: using a low carb, high fat diet to fight Alzheimer’s disease, memory loss, and cognitive decline. Like many others, Amy struggled for years to lose weight on a standard American diet despite getting plenty of exercise, and finally found success with a low carb diet. Later she decided to do her masters thesis on the relationship between our modern, high carbohydrate diets and Alzheimer’s disease, with that thesis ending up as the framework foundation upon which she wrote her book!

I do have to make a bit of an apology at the start here. While this was a fascinating conversation with a great deal of important information to share, it’s a bit more disjointed than the ones I’ve done previously. I usually try to give these talks a logical progression to take you from no knowledge of the subject to a basic, functional understanding of what’s going wrong and why. But when it comes down to the inner workings of the brain, simplifying it to that level proved to be a bit difficult!

With that said, we covered a great deal in this interview, and combined with the resources on the show notes page (which you can find over at deskbound.co/episode15) you should walk away with a decent understanding of what’s going on.

In this chat Amy and I discuss how Alzheimer’s functions and why it’s now being referred to as type 3 diabetes, why beta-amyloid plaques was mistakenly blamed for Alzheimer’s similar to how cholesterol was mistakenly blamed for cardiovascular disease, how the medications people are often prescribed at this later stage in life can exacerbate the cognitive decline initiated by Alzheimer’s, and much more.

So enjoy this chat with Amy Berger, author of The Alzheimer’s Antidote.

Notes and resources:

Amy’s book, The Alzheimer’s Antidote: http://a.co/d/gfaKmqw

Amy’s website: http://www.tuitnutrition.com/

Amy on twitter: https://twitter.com/TuitNutrition

Talk by Amy at KetoCon 2018: https://youtu.be/uzwarr6Dgpw

Article by Amy: Is Alzheimer’s a Metabolic Disease?

Article by Amy: The Ketogenic Diet for Alzheimer’s Disease

Outline:

1:40 – How Amy came across low carb diets and how it affected her health efforts

4:00 – How Amy came to study Alzheimer’s and it’s connection to diet, and subsequently write her book

7:25 – Amy’s goal with writing her book

9:30 – Alzheimer’s as an energy shortage in the brain, and the massive amount of energy the brain consumes relative to the percentage of body mass it occupies

11:30 – How the brain can have an energy shortage when people eat so much

13:45 – The metabolic dysfunction of Alzheimer’s compared to that of type 2 diabetes

18:00 – Brief overview of how the brain works and how neurons fire

21:55 – How the foundation of Alzheimer’s (the energy shortage in the brain) is laid decades before the disease manifests itself

23:45 – How the constant degradation of our metabolic processes over years and decades is what leads to both Alzheimer’s and diabetes

25:30 – Dr. Joseph Kraft and his discoveries around the frequency of hyperinsulinemia

29:45 – The mitochondria (AKA the powerhouses of the cells) and how the standard American diet deprives them of what they need to operate properly

32:30 – The function of beta-amyloid protein, and how it’s unjustly blamed for Alzheimer’s

35:25 – Beta-amyloid protein being blamed for Alzheimer’s similar to the way cholesterol being blamed for cardiovascular disease

39:20 – Why beta-amyloid protein builds up and the role of insulin degrading enzyme

44:30 – Bare bones explanation of how chronically elevated insulin leads to Alzheimer’s

46:00 – Other medications that interfere with cognition

51:10 – How to spike ketone levels to improve cognitive function, even after someone’s far down the rabbit hole of damage from Alzheimer’s

57:30 – Dr. Mary Newport, the doctor who added coconut oil to her husbands oatmeal every day and the ensuing improvements in cognition that followed

59:15 – Where to follow Amy’s work moving forward

The post Episode 15 – Preventing Alzheimer’s and Cognitive Decline with Amy Berger appeared first on Deskbound.