Columbia researchers say you can cut your risk for Alzheimer's disease through proper nutrition.

One fact that I’ve hammered over my readers’ heads over the years is the prevalence of heart disease.  It remains the number one cause of death for Americans, but believe it or not, between the years 2000 and 2006, there’s been an 11 percent drop in heart disease related deaths.  Other conditions where there’s been a decline in deaths include stroke (18 percent fewer), prostate cancer (8 percent fewer) and HIV (16 percent fewer).

That’s good news, but as is typical when good news is reported, here comes the bad news: There’s been a dramatic rise in Alzheimer’s related deaths.  In fact, comparing 2006 to 2000, there’s been a near 50 percent rise in Alzheimer’s related deaths, making it the seventh leading cause of death in the U.S.  Approximately 26 million people have Alzheimer’s in the world, 5.3 million of whom live stateside.

While advances are being made every day in doctors’ knowledge about this mysterious brain disease, there’s no cure for it.  Medicines are available to slow its progression, but nothing can stop its advancement.  In short, once you have it, you can’t get rid of it.

Thus, prevention remains your best defense.  And it’s becoming clearer and clearer that it all starts with your diet.  Researchers from Columbia University confirm this.

Researchers discovered this recently after analyzing the dieting habits of approximately 2,150 adults over the age of 65 for four years.  Through food frequency questionnaires and annual checkups (i.e., every 18 months), they wanted to see if there was any correlation between what people were eating and whether or not they were eventually diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.

According to their results, people who tended to eat a diet similar to the Mediterranean diet – one that’s rich in vegetable oils like olive oil, fresh fruits and vegetables like berries and broccoli, as well as nuts like almonds and walnuts—were 40 percent less likely to have developed Alzheimer’s disease.  Other brain boosting foods include seafood sources high in omega-3s like snapper and salmon.

The people more likely to have developed Alzheimer’s were those who ate diets high in saturated fat from food sources like butter, organ meat and red meat.

The full findings appear in the pages of the Archives of Neurology.

Yet more evidence that our diet plays a HUGE role in how healthy our mind will be.  No, a healthy diet doesn’t guarantee you’ll be from Alzheimer’s disease, but if you’ve had relatives with Alzheimer’s, you’d be foolish not to take every precaution available.  Not much is known about Alzheimer’s but what is known is that’s its hereditary.

Sources:
alz.org
newsmaxhealth.com

The last time I wrote about the Mediterranean diet – the diet that evokes thoughts of ocean and sand, yet is built on the brick-and-mortar foundation of fresh fruits and vegetables, nuts, and sea-faring protein sources – I talked about a huge study that showed how strict adherents to it reduced their risk of the country’s most pernicious diseases, like Alzheimer’s , cancer , Parkinson’s , and heart disease – America’s leading cause of death.

Well, you can now add another deadly disease the Mediterranean diet’s leaves in its wake:  hypertension.

As most of you know, I’ve written extensively about high blood pressure.  Hypertension runs in my family, and it took me several years to develop a program aimed at lowering high blood pressure that avoids the life-long cycle of having to take medications.

The proven techniques and strategies are compiled in my book, The Blood Pressure Miracle .  Some of the strategies I talk about relate back to diet, with many of the foods I suggest straight out of the Mediterranean diet playbook.

So this latest study really substantiates much of what’s already been substantiated in my book (and substantiated by those who’ve given it rave reviews on Amazon.com).  But it never hurts to have more evidence supporting natural health solutions – particularly for the skeptics and naysayers of natural health, for whom it takes an act of God to convince them of its efficacy.

The latest study comes out of the University of Navarra, hailed widely as one of Spain’s top private universities.  The researchers there analyzed data collected from approximately 8,500 middle-aged men and women (average age:  41).  They found that those men and women whose diets consisted of primarily fresh fruits and vegetables and limited doses of olive oil consumption (less than 15 grams per day) were at a reduced risk for hypertension than those who didn’t follow similar eating patterns.

Doesn’t get much simpler than that, does it?

The study’s full findings are published in the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition .

Just as hypertension is a huge problem in America, it’s just as big a problem throughout the countries that make up Europe.  In the UK, for instance, it’s estimated that one in three Britons have high blood pressure, and one out of those three doesn’t even know it.  In Germany, the prevalence of high BP is even higher than it is in America, as a 2003 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that the prevalence of hypertension was highest in Germany and lowest in America (when comparing the prevalence rate among six European countries to Canada and the United States).

Hypertension is not just figures given to you by your doctor, where you either have it or you don’t, and that’s that.  Because if you have hypertension, you’re often forced to confront a boatload of other health issues, be them intensely private (e.g. sexual), to intensely serious (e.g. heart disease).

It doesn’t have to be that way, though.  Whether it’s taking proactive steps to avoid hypertension from the get-go, to implementing the steps needed to get those numbers down from where they are now, hypertension does not have to be a part of your life.

And it all starts with diet.

Sources:
foodnavigator.com
bpassoc.org.uk
cat.inist.fr

You are what you eat. It’s a statement that’s become so commonplace, so hackneyed, it’s a cliché; the words just don’t really mean much anymore.  But a study recently released gives life to this age old phrase—literally.

According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, 57 percent of Americans are overweight.  That’s the equivalent of approximately 39 million people or one in every sixth person.  It comes as no surprise, then, that the United States has the rather infamous distinction as the Western world’s leader in obesity, this according to data gathered by the US Census Bureau in 2004 (Mexico is the runner-up).

Of course, the ubiquity of obesity is due to a number of factors, not the least of which is a general lack of exercise.  But the leading reason, of course, is poor eating habits.  What makes this fact distressing, particularly for those of us who make healthy living a priority, is that poor food choices have become designated “Western”—i.e. the Western world, i.e. where we live!  Meanwhile, a diet that’s designated “Mediterranean,” is a diet that’s known for its healthful qualities.  And the numbers indicate as much, for the same numbers gathered by the US Census Bureau regarding the rate of obesity among countries places Mediterranean countries low on the obesity scale (pardon the pun).

A Mediterranean diet is one rife with fruits, vegetables, whole grains, nuts and beans—all foods that are low in saturated fat and high in monounsaturated fats.  By contrast, the Western diet is one rife with processed foods, foods made with refined flour and hydrogenated oils, “fast” foods—in short, all foods high in saturated fat and low in nutrient value.       

Now, most of us don’t eat an exclusively Western diet, nor do most of us eat an exclusively Mediterranean diet.  But it might be in our interest to develop a Mediterranean eating habit—especially for those of us who have a family history of Alzheimer’s disease.  According to research conducted out of Columbia University, people afflicted with Alzheimer’s disease have a significantly diminished chance of dying as a result of the disease, depending on how closely they followed a Mediterranean diet.

Researchers found that of the 192 New Yorker’s with Alzheimer’s disease studied over a four and a half year period, those that adhered to a Mediterranean diet closest lived four years longer than those who significantly deviated from it.  Of those who followed a Mediterranean diet moderately, their life expectancy was about a year and a half longer.  The findings are published in the journal American Academy of Neurology.

The significance of this finding with respect to Alzheimer’s disease is so impressive that the researchers hope to discover whether or not the Mediterranean diet can slow the disease’s progression in future studies.

The prevalence of Alzheimer’s is fast becoming a problem that’s on par with obesity, as  approximately one in seven elderly Americans are afflicted with some form of dementia, according to the National Institutes of Health.  For the sake of the minds and lives of those with the most wisdom—our elders—let us share these important findings with them.