At one time Alzheimer’s disease was a disease considered with unknown etiology (or cause). Today it is considered different in the eyes of many in the medical profession. By a Dr. Mercola a physician who founded Mercola.com (Mercola.com is now the world’s top natural health resource site, with over 1.5 million subscribers.) feels this about alzeiher’s disease:

“The cause of the debilitating, and fatal, brain disease Alzheimer’s is conventionally said to be a mystery.”

While we know that certain diseases, like type 2 diabetes, are definitively connected to the foods you eat, Alzheimer’s is generally thought to strike without warning or reason.

That is, until recently.

Now, a growing body of research suggests there may be a powerful connection between the foods you eat and your risk of Alzheimer’s disease and dementia, via similar pathways that cause type 2 diabetes. Some have even re-named Alzheimer’s as “type 3 diabetes.””

Can You Eat Your Way to Alzheimer’s?

In a recent animal study, researchers from Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island were able to induce many of the characteristic brain changes seen with Alzheimer’s disease (disorientation, confusion, inability to learn and remember) by interfering with insulin signaling in their brains.

Know that faulty insulin (and leptin, another hormone) signaling is an underlying cause for insulin resistance, which, of course, typically leads to type 2 diabetes. However, while insulin is usually associated with its role in keeping your blood sugar levels in a healthy range, it also plays a role in brain signaling. When researchers disrupted the proper signaling of insulin in the brain, it resulted in dementia.

What does this have to do with your diet? Let us go back to one of my articles on diabetes and how it impacts your diet. It states “The foods we eat that contain starches, carbohydrates, calories are made up of sugar. When food reaches our stomach in time digestion starts to take place where these foods are broken down in the stomach into individual or complex sugar molecules ( glucose being one of the most common and important ones). The glucose then passes from our stomach into our bloodstream when it reaches the liver 60 to 80 % of the glucose gets stored in that organ turning glucose into inactive glucose that’s converted to glycogen. The purpose for glycogen is when our glucose is low and our body needing energy we have this extra stored sugar, glycogen, to rely on. This is done by the liver which allows the sugar to be stored and released back into the bloodstream if we need it=energy, since nothing is in our stomach at that time, in that case scenario). When glucose=an active sugar, it is our energy for our cells and tissues and is a sugar ready to be utilized by the body where it is needed, by many organs. Think of a car for one moment, and what makes it run? That would be gas/fuel for it to function. The same principle with glucose in your bloodstream=fuel for the human body so we can function, for without it we wouldn’t survive. That is the problem with a person that has diabetes. They eat, they break the food down, the glucose gets in the blood but the glucose fuel can’t be used due to lack of or NO insulin at all. Insulin allows glucose to pass into our cells and tissues to be used as energy/fuel for the body parts to work. Glucose is used as the principle source of energy (It is used by the brain for energy, the muscles for both energy and some storage, liver for more glucose storage=that is where glucose is converted to glycogen, and even stored in fat tissue using it for triglyceride production). Glucose does get sent to other organs for more storage, as well. Insulin plays that vital role in allowing glucose to be distributed throughout the body. Without insulin the glucose has nowhere to go.

So how does this impact your brain thinking? “This new focus on the Alzheimer’s/Diabetes/Insulin connection follows a growing recognition of insulin’s role in the brain. Until recently, the hormone was typecast as a regulator of blood sugar, giving the cue for muscles, liver and fat cells to extract sugar from the blood and either use it for energy or store it as fat. We now know that it is also a master multitasker: it helps neurons, particularly in the hippocampus and frontal lobe, take up glucose for energy, and it also regulates neurotransmitters, like acetylcholine, which are crucial for memory and learning.” What is effected with Alzheimer’s disease? Your memory and learning, So your diet plays a big role in Alzheimer’s disease.”                                                                                        

Over-consumption of sugars and grains is what ultimately causes your body to be incapable of “hearing” the proper signals from insulin and leptin, leaving you insulin resistant in both body and brain. Alzheimer’s disease was tentatively dubbed “type 3 diabetes” in early 2005 when researchers learned that the pancreas is not the only organ that produces insulin. Your brain also produces insulin, and this brain insulin is necessary for the survival of your brain cells.

If You Have Diabetes, Your Risk of Alzheimer’s Increases Dramatically

Diabetes is linked to a 65 percent increased risk of developing Alzheimer’s, which may be due, in part, because insulin resistance and/or diabetes appear to accelerate the development of plaque in your brain, which is a hallmark of Alzheimer’s. Separate research has found that impaired insulin response was associated with a 30 percent higher risk of Alzheimer’s disease, and overall dementia and cognitive risks were associated with high fasting serum insulin, insulin resistance, impaired insulin secretion and glucose intolerance.

A drop in insulin production in your brain may contribute to the degeneration of your brain cells, mainly by depriving them of glucose, and studies have found that people with lower levels of insulin and insulin receptors in their brain often have Alzheimer’s disease (people with type 2 diabetes often wind up with low levels of insulin in their brains as well). As explained in New Scientist, which highlighted this latest research:

What’s more, it encourages the process through which neurons change shape, make new connections and strengthen others. And it is important for the function and growth of blood vessels, which supply the brain with oxygen and glucose.

As a result, reducing the level of insulin in the brain can immediately impair cognition. Spatial memory, in particular, seems to suffer when you block insulin uptake in the hippocampus… Conversely, a boost of insulin seems to improve its functioning.

When people frequently gorge on fatty, sugary food, their insulin spikes repeatedly until it sticks at a high level. Muscle, liver and fat cells then stop responding to the hormone, meaning they don’t mop up glucose and fat in the blood. As a result, the pancreas desperately works overtime to make more insulin to control the glucose – and levels of the two molecules skyrocket.

The pancreas can’t keep up with the demand indefinitely, however, and as time passes people with type 2 diabetes often end up with abnormally low levels of insulin.”

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. 😉

“Remember that deep friendship is a key to true intimacy.”

Vernard Gant (author of FamilyLife.com)

Marriage is a bonding of two people who have spent a considerable period of time together. On average over a yr to 3 yrs is long enough to be able to decide whether an individual on both sides wants to make more of a commitment from committed couple being exclusive to now a couple for life.

During the time of exclusive commitment of 1 to 3 yrs (for some even more) both parties get to see the other person’s overall morals, values, priorities in life with interests. For some there a lot of common modalities with each other make a great pair but for others similarities are a few but also differences (from a few to multiple).   This is where with the differences can the two work out being in a relationship for life living with each other day in and day out or most days. Well yes it is just up to the two that make up the couple to want to take the initiative in learning the other one’s desires and interests but in regards to changing morals and values for some in the couple shouldn’t take place unless that individual wants to and believes that is the morals and values they want to live by not to make the other one happy since high odds the relationship won’t work out.

What makes a relationship honestly work. Well there are ingredients to it not just one thing.

Those ingredients entail:

Love/Commitment. At its core, love is a decision to be committed to another person. It is far more than a fleeting emotion as portrayed on television, the big screen, and romance novels. Everyday life wears away the “feel good side of marriage.” Feelings, like happiness, will fluctuate. But, real love is based on a couple’s vows of commitment: “For better or for worse” — when it feels good and when it doesn’t. Feelings come and go, but a true decision to be committed lasts forever – and that is what defines true love. It is a decision to be committed through the ups and the downs, the good and the bad. When things are going well, commitment is easy. But true love is displayed by remaining committed even through the trials of life in your marriage journey.

Sexual Faithfulness. Sexual faithfulness in marriage includes more than just our bodies. It also includes our eyes, mind, heart, and soul. When we devote our minds to sexual fantasies about another person, we sacrifice sexual faithfulness to our spouse. When we offer moments of emotional intimacies to another, we sacrifice sexual faithfulness to our spouse. Guard your sexuality daily and devote it entirely to your spouse. Sexual faithfulness requires self-discipline and an awareness of the consequences. Refuse to put anything in front of your eyes, body, or heart that would compromise your faithfulness as a spouse by either side. Including actions that can be perceived by the other as a break in the emotional, intimate, love, close friendship bonds you both have. Remember it is easy for human behavior to remember what was done badly to you but easy to forget the good that was done to you by your mate especially with fighting a lot. This brings in the old saying it’s easy to forgive but not forget it-human behavior. With fighting a lot this can easily put a big damper on the high impact of love covering all aspects from sexually to emotionally to simple how nice you are to one another with respecting each other. Both parties have to put their spouse first when fire escalates irrelevant who initiated the fire for if the fire gets out of hand to control it will be hard to put out or forget.  By preventing this from occurring in your relationship you always must consider your spouses feelings. It really isn’t hard. This brings us to the next ingredient.

Humility. We all have weaknesses and relationships always reveal these faults quicker than anything else on earth. An essential building block of a healthy marriage is the ability to admit that you are not perfect, that you will make mistakes, and that you will need forgiveness. Holding an attitude of superiority over your partner will bring about resentment and will prevent your relationship from moving forward. If you struggle in this area, grab a pencil and quickly write down three things that your partner does better than you – that simple exercise should help you stay humble. Repeat as often as necessary which will keep retain this good knowledge you have about your mate and make you bite your tongue in the next disagreement. For when you do have those disagreements to arguments it brings up our next ingredient.

Patience/Forgiveness. Because no one is perfect, patience and forgiveness will always be required in a marriage relationship. Successful marriage partners learn to show unending patience and forgiveness to their partner. They humbly admit their own faults and do not expect perfection from their partner. They do not bring up past errors in an effort to hold their partner hostage. And they do not seek to make amends or get revenge when mistakes occur. If you are holding onto a past hurt from your partner, forgive him or her. It will set your heart and relationship free.

Time. Relationships don’t work without time investment. Never have, never will. Any successful relationship requires intentional, quality time together. And quality time rarely happens when quantity time is absent. The relationship with your spouse should be the most intimate and deep relationship you have. Therefore, it is going to require more time than any other relationship. If possible, set aside time each day for your spouse. And a date-night once in awhile wouldn’t hurt either.

Honesty and Trust. Honesty and trust become the foundation for everything healthy in a marriage. But unlike most of the other essentials on this list, trust takes time. You can become selfless, committed, or patient in a moment, but trust always takes time. Trust is only built after weeks, months, and years of being who you say you are and doing what you say you’ll do. It takes time, so start now… and if you need to rebuild trust in your relationship, you’ll need to work even harder.

Communication. Successful marriage partners communicate as much as possible. They certainly discuss kids’ schedules, grocery lists, and utility bills. But they don’t stop there. They also communicate hopes, dreams, fears, and anxieties. They don’t just discuss the changes that are taking place in the kid’s life, they also discuss the changes that are taking place in their own hearts and souls. This essential key cannot be overlooked because honest, forthright communication becomes the foundation for so many other things on this list: commitment, patience, and trust… just to name a few.

Selflessness. Although it will never show up on any survey, more marriages are broken up by selfishness than any other reason. Surveys blame it on finances, lack of commitment, infidelity, or incompatibility, but the root cause for most of these reasons is selfishness. A selfish person is committed only to himself or herself, shows little patience, and never learns how to be a successful spouse. Give your hopes, dreams, and life to your partner but your partner has to want to live and enhance those dreams with you with never putting the majority of your dreams down or not acknowledging them. By both partners accepting and supporting each other’s dreams only allows the two in the marriage to begin to live life together and only intensify the love for each other with respect.

Lastly give incentives and rewards.

For the couples in general affective affirmation is a good key to marriage happiness. Affective affirmation is for example letting your partner know that they’re special, valued and you don’t take them for granted. Showing your mate through incentives and rewards is acknowledging them in a loving to even intimate way, depending on what the spouse uses as a reward or giving as a good incentive.

Couples show affective affirmation through words and actions. It’s as simple as saying “I love you” or “You’re my best friend.” Affirmative behaviors can be anything from turning the coffee pot on in the morning for your partner to sending them a sexy email to filling their tank with gas.

Contrary to popular belief, men need more affective affirmation than women because women can get it from other people in our lives.

The key is to give consistent affirmation rather than heaps of it at once.

You both can make a marriage live on for life but it’s also up to both to make it exciting and a wondrous journey but many make it dull, boring to dense that at times leads to curiosity out of the marriage to divorce. It is up to the couple to both make the marriage work not only one can make it work but the two have to work at it to make it a great marriage to both parties.

Heart disease continues to be the number one killer; cancer, the number 2 killer, not far behind. The tragic aspect of these deadly diseases is that they could all be cured, I do believe, if we had sufficient funding.

 Arlen Specter ((February 12, 1930 – October 14, 2012) was a United States Senator from Pennsylvania

Signs and Symptoms of CHF:

A number of symptoms are associated with heart failure, but none is specific for the condition. Perhaps the best known symptom is short of breath (called dyspnea). In heart failure, this may result from excess fluid in the lungs. The breathing difficulties may occur at rest or during exercise. In some cases, congestion may be severe enough to interrupt or prevent you from sleeping.

-Fatigue or easy tiring is another common symptom. As the heart’s pumping capacity decreases, muscles and other tissues receive less oxygen and nutrition, which are carried in the blood. Without proper fuel (oxygen from the blood) provided by our engine (the heart), the body cannot perform as much work as it use to do (just like going from in shape to out of shape in time). The ending line is this will result into fatigue.

-Fluid accumulation will cause swelling in the feet, ankles, legs, and occasionally the abdomen (if the fluid building up in the body gets severe), what we medically call edema.   Through gravity the blood goes backwards and our body allows water to transfer in the skin to allow the fluid to go somewhere other than the bloodstream to decrease fluid overload to the heart by compensating. It body compensates since the blood is going backwards from the heart causing fluid back up. Excess fluid retained by the body will result into weight gain, which sometimes occurs fairly quickly (if you have CHF already you should always call your M.D. if you weight gain is 3lbs or more in a week, odds are high this is due to fluid building up).

-Persistent coughing is another common sign, especially coughing that regularly produces mucus or pink, blood-tinged sputum. Some people develop raspy breathing or wheezing.

-Heart failure usually goes through a slow development process, the symptoms may not appear until the condition has progressed over the years. This happens because the heart first compensates by making adjustments with the heart that delay or slow down but do not prevent, the eventual loss in pumping capacity. In time failure happens, just like a car in when it gets older over several years is starts showing one problem after another and is exchanged for a newer car; same principle with the heart in that you show signs and symptoms as your heart starts to slow down to failure and its either treat the problem or get a transplant of the organ (which is unlikely to happen).  The heart first hides the underlying process but compensates by doing this to your heart:

1- Enlargement to the muscle of the heart (causing “dilatation”) which allows more blood into the heart.

2- Thickening of muscle fibers (causing “hypertrophy”) to strengthen the heart muscle, which allows the heart to contract more forcefully and pump more blood.

3- More frequent contraction, which increases circulation.

By making these adjustments, or compensating, the heart can temporarily make up for losses in pumping ability, sometimes for years. However, compensation of the organ can only last so long, not forever (like anything in life the living thing or an object will go through a ending life process to termination). Eventually the heart cannot offset the lost ability to pump blood, and the signs of heart failure appear.

DIAGNOSING CHF:

In many cases, physicians diagnose heart failure during a simple physical examination. Readily identifiable signs are shortness of breath, fatigue, and swollen ankles and feet. The physician also will check for the presence of risk factors, such as hypertension, obesity and a history of heart problems.

Using a stethoscope, the physician can listen to a patient breathe and identify the sounds of lung congestion. The stethoscope also picks up the abnormal heart sounds indicative of heart failure.

If one or not both symptoms or the patient’s history point to a clear cut diagnosis, the physician may recommend any of a variety of laboratory tests, including, initially, an electrocardiogram (EKG), which uses recording devices placed on the chest to evaluate the electrical activity of a patient’s heartbeat which will be affected by CHF.

Echocardiography is another means of evaluating heart function from outside the body. This works through sound waves that bounce off the heart are recorded and translated into images. The pictures can reveal abnormal heart sizes, shape, and movement. Echocardiography also can be used to calculate a patient’s ejection fraction which is a measurement of the amount of blood pumped when the heart contracts.

Another possible test is the chest x-ray, which also determines the heart’s size and shape, as well as the presence of congestion in the lungs.

Tests help rule other possible causes of symptoms. The symptoms of heart failure can result when the heart is made to work too hard, instead of from damaged muscle (like in a heart attack). Conditions that overload the heart occur rarely and include severe anemia and thyrotoxicosis (a disease resulting from an overactive thyroid gland).

Treatment=Prevention as the number one therapy of CHF:

-If not diagnosed yet your already possibly ahead. Without this diagnosis you can get started on making yourself further away from being diagnosed with this disease. How to reach this goal is through living a routine life through healthy habits practiced, healthy dieting over all, and balancing rest with exercise during the week 30-40 minutes a day or 1 hour to 1.5 hours 3 times a week and not being obese. They all would benefit the heart in not stressing it out making the heart’s function harder in doing its function. When the heart stresses out it is at risk for lacking oxygen putting it at potential for angina (heart pain) to a heart attack with over time leading toward failure of the heart.

TAKE THE STEP AND GET ACTIVE OR CONTINUE TO STAY ACTIVE IN YOUR , with healthy eating balancing with rest as well!  Always check with your primary doctor first.

“To put it simply, HF means the heart isn’t pumping blood as well as it once did. It’s no longer delivering all the blood and oxygen that the body and its organs need to work normally.   This can make average day life challenging”

American Heart Association

“We don’t have solid evidence that vegans live longer than vegetarians, or that vegetarians live longer than meat-eaters,” Montgomery says. “But we do know that eating low levels of red meat and high levels of lean meats and fish is a way to optimize your heart health.”

Tony Rahagan (author on Wed M.D.)