By M Grace Grzanek
Batavia, Ill.
Many may attribute it to old age, such as, he’s getting old and forgetful and must have dementia! No so. Dementia is not a disease of old age, rather a disease resulting from a lifetime of poor food choices. It drastically changes your mind.
Dementia comes in many styles. Alzheimer’s is only one. There is Lewy-body dementia which affects movement. Fronto-temporal dementia creates personality changes, blocks the ability to communicate, and makes for poor judgment calls. Dementia changes not just your memory, but your mind.
The genes for these diseases often are inherited, caused by a mutation in a specific gene. Yet, as all science will point out, there is no guarantee that someone who inherits the gene actually will have the experience of dementia.
Genes give us predisposition, but, never a guarantee. The inherited genes stay turned off until a trigger turns them on. With dementia, it’s life choices, essentially food choice, that turn on the genes.
Science is naming dementia as diabetes type 3. In other words, there is a connection in the body of a person with dementia to their body’s inability to use the insulin the body needs to process sugars and starches and turn these into energy. When the body ceases to use the insulin to process the sugars and starches, the insulin levels in the brain fall and fail to bring these nutrients to the brain. So, dementia develops and advances.
It happens through the growth in the brain of a substances, amyloid plaques. It is similar to a tree in Autumn. The amyloid plaques take over the brain cells The brain shrinks.
What helps?
• Tumeric contains curried foods to help keep down inflammation.
• Coconut oil prevents dementia. Eat fresh coconut. Use coconut sugar, not cane sugar.
• Extra-virgin olive oil. Keep away from corn oil, vegetable oil, canola oil.
• Omega 3 oil. It’s in wild-caught fishes and their oils. Three ounces is plenty. Farmed fish are fed with harmful GMO grains. The standard American diet is filled with Omega 6 fatty acids found in grains such as cupcakes, pizza dough, buns, prep-packaged food, cold cuts, phony cheeses. The heathy ratio should be 2:1, Omega 6 to Omega 3. Too many Americans take a ratio of 17:1 which sets up for dementia.
• Vitamin B is the brain power found n fish oil.
• Vitamin E is in primarily in plants and not in meats, in nuts and not peanuts, and in greens.
• Keep away from sugars, starches, and wheat, but not from gluten.
Sugars are inflammatory. Our bodies can not handle loads of sugars and is bad for the pancreas. Sugar is put by the irresponsible food industry into everything from turkey to peanut butter to sodas.
We have allowed ourselves to eat pounds of hamburger buns, pastas, tortillas, pizzas, muffins, sandwich bread, all carbohydrates from wheat. Wheat has been hybridized by agribusiness into a plant that is no longer wheat, however, in effect frankenfood. Eating wheat-flour foods allows foggy thinking. My husband inherited dementia genes from both parents, however, we ate farm to table. He made it to 99 years.
If we change our mind now on what we eat, we will not change our minds into dementia. Eating habits are important to good health, more so than the average persons understands. Bad food habits lead to insulin resistance and to dementia.
—The Just Food Initiative