“A healthy diet and lifestyle are your best weapons to fight cardiovascular disease. It’s not as hard as you may think! Remember, it’s the overall pattern of your choices that counts. Make the simple steps in your life for long-term benefits to your health and your heart. Go to AHA diet and life style recommendations for more information.”
American Heart Association
“If you are what you eat, it follows that you want to stick to a healthy diet that’s well balanced. You want to eat a variety of foods,You don’t want to be overly restrictive of any one food group or eat too much of another”
Stephen Bickston, MD, AGAF-American Gastroenterological Association Fellow (professor of internal medicine and director of the Inflammatory Bowel Disease Center at Virginia Commonwealth University Health Center in Richmond)
“Eating Disorders rank among the most serious public health concerns in the United States and have the highest mortality rate of any mental illness.:
The center for eating disorders at Sheppard Pratt
ANOREXIA NERVOSA VS BULEMIA
“When one hears the term eating disorder, most Americans’ minds automatically think about anorexia and bulimia. Both of these mental illnesses are devastating to the victims’ bodies, mental health, and self-image, as well as the victims’ loved ones. These people experience drastic changes in weight and appearance. Although they are similar, these illnesses differ in the victims’ motivation, their symptoms, and the ramifications of their behavior on their health.”
Lone Star College
“Black Americans — and Mexican-Americans — have twice the risk of diabetes as white Americans. In addition, blacks with diabetes have more serious complications — such as loss of vision, loss of limbs, and kidney failure — than whites.” (Keep in mind all 3 are caused by Diabetes (DM) but if the pt had loss of vision or poor kidneys intially the DM made it worse.)
Maudene Nelson, RD, certified diabetes educator at Naomi Barry Diabetes Center at Columbia University.
“All humans have the same physiology, are vulnerable to the same illnesses, & respond to the same medicines. Naturally, diseases&responses to treatment do vary from person to person. There are unique issues that affect black Americans.”
Yancy, LeRoy M. Graham Jr., MD (On the American Lung Association’s board of directors, is associate clinical professor of pediatrics at Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta, and serves as staff physician for Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta.)
“Teen Dating Violence is defined as the physical, sexual, psychological, or emotional aggression within a dating relationship, including stalking.”
CDC Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
“Alzheimer’s disease is an irreversible, progressive brain disorder that slowly destroys memory and thinking skills, and eventually the ability to carry out the simplest tasks. In most people with Alzheimer’s, symptoms first appear in their mid-60s. Estimates vary, but experts suggest that more than 5.5 million Americans may have Alzheimer’s.”
NIH National Institute of Aging (https://www.nia.nih.gov/)
Alzheimer’s Might be “Brain Diabetes”
It’s becoming increasingly clear that the same pathological process that leads to insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes may also hold true for your brain. As you over-indulge on sugar and grains, your brain becomes overwhelmed by the consistently high levels of insulin and eventually shuts down its insulin signaling, leading to impairments in your thinking and memory abilities, and eventually causing permanent brain damage.
Regularly consuming more than 25 grams of fructose per day will dramatically increase your risk of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. Consuming too much fructose will inevitably wreak havoc on your body’s ability to regulate proper insulin levels.
Although fructose is relatively “low glycemic” on the front end, it reduces the affinity for insulin for its receptor leading to chronic insulin resistance and elevated blood sugar on the back end. So, while you may not notice a steep increase in blood sugar immediately following fructose consumption, it is likely changing your entire endocrine system’s ability to function properly behind the scenes.
Additionally, fructose has other modes of neurotoxicity, including causing damage to the circulatory system upon which the health of your nervous system depends, as well as profoundly changing your brain’s craving mechanism, often resulting in excessive hunger and subsequent consumption of additional empty carbohydrate-based calories.
In one study from UCLA, researchers found that rats fed a fructose-rich and omega-3 fat deficient diet (similar to what is consumed by many Americans) developed both insulin resistance and impaired brain function in just six weeks.
Plus, when your liver is busy processing fructose (which your liver turns into fat), it severely hampers its ability to make cholesterol, an essential building block of your brain crucial to its health. This is yet another important facet that explains how and why excessive fructose consumption is so detrimental to your health. Decreasing fructose intake is one of the most important moves you can take in decreasing the risk of Alzheimer’s disease in your lifetime.
Tips for avoiding Alzheimer’s Disease is Part 2 tomorrow. 😉
More Tips for Avoiding Alzheimer’s Disease
The beauty of following a healthy diet is that it helps treat and prevent all chronic degenerative diseases, from the common ones like heart disease, cancer, diabetes, obesity and Alzheimer’s to the ones you have never heard of or can’t even pronounce.
The first step is to eat healthy, maintaining exercise balanced with rest and practice healthy habits in addressing Alzheimer’s disease, which is currently at epidemic proportions, with 5.4 million Americans – including one in eight people aged 65 and over – living with the disease.7 By 2050, this is expected to jump to 16 million, and in the next 20 years it is projected that Alzheimer’s will affect one in four Americans. People we need to live healthier if not to help ourselves our future young ones.
In spite of how common memory loss is among Westerners, it is NOT a “normal” part of aging. While even mild “senior moments” may be caused by the same brain lesions associated with Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia, these cognitive changes are by no means inevitable! People who experience very little decline in their cognitive function up until their deaths have been found (post-mortem) to be free of brain lesions, showing that it’s entirely possible to prevent the damage from occurring in the first place and one of the best ways to do this is by leading a healthy lifestyle.