Ozempic-like weight loss drugs may protect against Alzheimer's
Practically every news service has picked up this story (CNN, CNBC, USA Today Forbes, Business Insider and so on...), but this one on NBC is the one that the very title practically calls it a miracle drug to prevent alzheimer's.
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https://www.nbcnews.com/health/heal...mers-rcna163459 |
We've talked repeatedly about how the health problems that weight loss corrects just happen to be the same ones that semaglutide drugs correct.
Well this one actually tells me that it's not even a matter of correcting the problem with weight loss since these drugs apparently slow the progression of Alzhemier's too. Very often those who are not seriously overweight (much less morbidly obese) get alzhemiers. And then alzheimer's patients end up losing a lot of weight as the disease progresses. There's long been speculation that it's blood sugar issues (at least in part) that causes alzheimers. My mother had alzheimer's and she was definitely a sugar-holic. She always had normal blood sugars though - if it's related sugar/carb consumption and blood sugars, surely it also has to do with insulin levels. Mom never gorged on sweets - her eating was always very controlled, but she always hated the taste and texture of "grease" so she ate very, very little fat. By the early 1990's she was thoroughly convinced by the Powers That Be that she needed to eat as little fat as possible, and stick to very small servings of protein. (It should be noted that she rarely ate any dairy products - lifelong stomach upset from dairy products, so she was missing protein from dairy sources too, while drinking juices, which provided even more sugar) When her energy would get low during the day, she'd say she needed some sugar. Sometimes that meant a piece of hard candy or a piece of chocolate, but it was just as likely she'd have a handful of grapes or a piece of fruit. She always had a cake in the house (for many years she was making what she called "breakfast cake", which had oats along with the white flour, and lot of dried fruit mixed in with lots of sugar - sort of a cross between zucchini bread or banana bread and fruit cake) She almost always ate bread with meals - approx 30-50 carbs worth of bread at every meal, often with a thin smear of jelly on a roll. As her alzheimers advanced, she ate more and more carbs - her caregivers said she started globbing about an inch of jelly on her roll at mealtime, which would have been easily 10 times as much as she used when I was a kid. My point in all this is that it's not the overweight that's the problem in all these diseases that the semaglutide type drugs are "fixing" - the weight is only a symptom. The real problem is the high carb diet that THEY want every man, woman, and child to eat. Cut the carbs and you lose significant amounts of weight, get your blood sugar on a much more even keel, and correct a plethora of health conditions. |
I'm sorry to hear about your mother. The increase in sugar intake is an attempt for the brain to get fuel.
This broken pathway is what ketones bypass. But to get them a good diet is essential. By the time people refuse to eat hearty meals I don't know what can be done. What a GLP-1 medication is doing is not specific to Alzheimer's. The threat is more than glycation, because the physical crushing of organs, nerves, and pathways cause damage, too. |
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Mom was just a couple months shy of 94 when she died, and I think you need to expect some mental deterioration at that age in most cases, but in my opinion the mental deterioration had been going on for at least 15 years. My brother says 11 years, but he saw her every day, which I think made it more difficult to recognize the small changes that started occurring years earlier. I live much further away and often didn't see her for several months at a time, so it was a lot more difficult for me to "explain away" the changes that I saw from one visit to the next. It wasn't that she was refusing to heat a good diet - it was the definition she'd been convinced constituted a healthy diet, which as her mental ability started to go, she did as you said and wanted more and more sugar (and starch - since that converts to glucose even faster than sugar) just to keep herself going throughout the day. I can certainly identify with that from my decades on a low fat, minimal protein, "heart healthy diet" - I was utterly exhausted all the time, while constantly giving in to cravings for sweets and starches. |
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Obviously targeting some kind of "learning center" and perhaps if they studied why carbs create addiction we'd all know more. I can tell you that alcoholism has been studied as a B vitamin deficiency (they are all vital, but B12 the most) with some success, likewise it is connected to what might be called "sugar reward" in the brain. This is all stuff which fits in with people suffering from malnutrition, and responding by cramming in more high carb/low nutrient food, which wreaks havoc and makes things worse. Another thing that fits into the malnutrition angle is how so many people on Carnivore (two main reasons, difficulty with weight loss and/or autoimmune issues) and they are reporting that their alcohol, tobacco, even compulsive thoughts, diminish and fade away. Also, my therapeutic niacin regimen, while I researched it, turned up a few stories of people who found that niacin did similar work for them. Likewise, I find the mental stability from the lack of anxiety keeping me on my regimen, for years now. And believe me when I say there's a been a few anxious years lately, for everyone :) so the fact I'm actually getting better now is also about my niacin. All of these mental notes are much more worth following up. But our drug research now isn't about helping people. It's about something a company can patent and sell. That's all they are looking for. That's why it's a big mystery. No one is chasing easy & cheap & tapping into the body's real power. When that's what we need. |
Looking at it from the addiction angle, it's interesting that it seems to inhibit behaviors related to addictive substances: alcohol, drugs, shopping, food.
We know that carbs in general can be extremely addictive - it's one reason why there are (just as a rough guess based on how many pages of user names there are under each letter of the alphabet) thousands of members on this site, but very few are currently active members: It's incredibly difficult to give up carbs in a world where practically everything in the grocery stores and on restaurant menus is carb-based, especially as those carbs are tweaked, and more highly processed to make them more and more addictive. One thing I've noticed is that because the drug makes it difficult to digest foods that are more satiating (proteins and fats), most users are still eating mostly carbs. The ones on those drugs who are avoiding most carbs are doing it for reasons other than weight loss (because they can eat anything they want on the drugs, and don't feel the need to eat a LC diet to promote weight loss). But when they bring their diet down to mostly protein, they seem to be having a very difficult time eating more than a very small portion of mostly protein, especially if the protein comes with a decent amount of fat. They're already not hungry most of the time because of the drugs and can really only eat a fairly limited amount of carbs, but doing it significantly lower in carbs results in very low calorie consumption. But then while off the drugs (or as the weekly shot wears off), they lose all control and want to eat everything in sight... including carbs. In fact carbs seem to be what they crave the most as the shot wears off, so they're desperate for their next "fix". The real question is are they more desperate for the next shot to calm the carb and food in general cravings, or more desperate for the amount of carby food they used to eat? Is this how it works for other addictions too? Will the alcoholic make up for a week of no alcohol by going on a huge bender when the shot wears off? Will the shopaholic put dozens of things they want but don't need in their Amazon cart and hit "checkout" the day their shot wears off? In the end, is it better to have 6 days of drug induced control... and one day of unbridled addictive behavior? OR find some other, more reliable way of stemming the addiction for good? Because the drugs are not really helping them kick the carb addiction, just suppressing it temporarily. |
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