Reversing Alzheimer’s Disease?

Reversing Alzheimer’s Disease (in your spare time)

a video script by Steven Fowkes

(note: it looks like I will not have time in any near future to be able to film this, so here it is in script form)

I suspect that many people watching this video may expect some kind of tongue-in-cheek stand-up routine.  The subtitle, in your spare time, is certainly intended to be humorous from the perspective of juxtaposing two apparently irreconcilable frames of reference.  Conventional wisdom has Alzheimer’s disease right up there with the worst personal calamities that might be imagined, like getting hit by a bus, or having your worst secret exposed in a public setting, or getting elected to the US Presidency.  And to suggest that this is something easily curable is possibly the most egregious form of simple mindedness that you might imagine.

But then again, maybe it is doubly humorous by being thinly veiled irony?

After all, don’t they say that humor is sometimes the best medicine?

So rather than demand credulity, I will let you puzzle the question of my sanity.

So here it comes, my bastardization of Letterman,
{sweep hands to match titling overlay}
the top-ten part-time therapies for reversing Alzheimer’s disease.

{ the heckler is left, the audience is center, and the inquirer is right }

Number 10.  Take you’re a daily multivitamin at lunch and dinner.

( comment from left, in background:  Boring!)

( Looking to left )  Just wait!  This is just a setup for #8.  Come on, bear with me; I’m supposed to be channeling Letterman,  OK?

Number 9.  Eat curry-spiced foods.

( to screen )  There’s a lot of ethnic chauvinism showing here, and more to come.

Number 8.  Take a medium-potency B-complex vitamin at lunch.

( whisper to screen ) Really, this is just to get you to take a vitamin pill in public.

Number 7.  Eat cilantro on your salads.

( inaudible comment from left:  ??? )

( glance left, then back )  Those, like me, that cannot tolerate cilantro can skate
on this one, or take low-dose DMSA with colloidal zeolite.

Number 6.  Take 5000 IU of vitamin D with breakfast.

That’s 4000 if you are white,
5000 if you have brown skin and
6000 if you have black skin.
And yes, you’re right, That’s outright racism, not ethnicity.

And to add some political incorrectness,
add another 1000 IU if you are well tanned (regardless of your original skin color).

Number 5.  Eat cold-water fatty fish on a regular basis.

OK. OK. Every crowd has a heckler.
*You* can eat Norwegian sardines out of tin if you have to.  Satisfied?

Number 4.  Don’t 4-go or 4-get your B3.

Lean in and whisper:  Hank Azaria, please 4-give me.

That’s niacin if you like flushing, niacinamide if you don’t,
and NADH if you are independently wealthy.

To right:  Could affluence be considered a kind of ethnicity?

Number 3.  Eat natto.  Just because it looks like somebody sneezed into the soy beans doesn’t mean that you have to get grossed out.

To left:  Hey hey, calm down.
You don’t have to leave.  Please sit back down.
Thank you.
You don’t have to actually eat natto; you can take your natto
as a capsule of nattokinase from the health food store.

Number 2.  Reduce your carbohydrate intake and stay in mild ketosis most of the week.

Fat-burning mode is Nature’s blessing for graceful aging.

And you, Mr. Schwartzenegger, I’m not talking about the Atkins diet.
It’s safer for older people to be on the Ezrin diet.  (pause) Yeah, yeah.

Look to right:  That’s E-Z-R-I-N, as in Calvin Ezrin, the endocrinologist.

And last but not least…

Number 1.  Eat lots of coconut oil.

See, I told you there would be lots of ethnicity here.

Those dyed-in-blue Americans who bought the government propaganda and have only experienced tropical oils on their popcorn in the movie theaters of yore should rejoice in the fact that you can now buy coconut oil in health food stores.

Sure you’ll pay twice the price.  If you’re smart, talk to your Southeast-Asian and Indian-American neighbors about buying it in their ethnic-food stores, which never stopped carrying it.

Well, now that my wit is half exposed, here are the deets that you will need to reverse Alzheimer’s disease in your spare time.

1.  Eat lots of coconut oil.

This is number one on my list because it addresses the most general aspect of Alzheimer’s disease as a biological brown-out of energy systems that power the brain, and because it is so easy to do.  Let’s face it.  *Anybody* can eat coconut oil.

Why coconut oil?

Coconut oil has the highest levels of medium-chain fats, which are amazingly different from the long-chain fats that we store in our bodies and get from eating animal fat.  MCT fats can be burned immediately for energy, giving your body and brain the energy they need to avoid Alzheimer’s disease, or reverse it if it is already manifesting.  These energy advantages are why MCT fats are found in mammal breast milk.

Don’t listen to the government, listen to Mother Nature; tropical oils are your friends.

Coconut oil also has the lowest levels of unsaturation.  That means that it does not go rancid, even sitting out on your kitchen counter at room temperature for months on end.

And it won’t suppress your immune system, cause wrinkles in your skin, or promote cancer like US-grown vegetable oils will.

In case you didn’t know, the brain is only 3% of the body mass but consumes 20% of the body’s energy.  This disproportionate energy requirement is the price we pay for clear minds, good memories, and the ability to anticipate future events.  Alzheimer’s disease is basically a brown-out power failure.  And coconut oil turns on the back-up generator.  Check it out online if you need to know how.  But, please, don’t ask a certified nutritionist or mainstream medical doctor to verify this, unless you are a masochist and like verbal abuse.

2.  Reduce your carbohydrate intake and get into ketosis.

Then stay there most of the time; 4-6 days a week is good.  Mild ketosis if good, moderate ketosis is OK, but heavy ketosis is over the top.  This is number two because it is more difficult to do and requires you to think and react to your body.

Flirting with ketosis is a way to tune up both the carbohydrate-burning and
fat-burning systems.  Nature relies upon fat for handling famines,
and so if you eat lots of food, your famine-coping systems never get exercised.
It’s even worse if you become insulin resistant, which is called syndrome X,
metabolic syndrome or pre-diabetes.

The combination of high carbohydrate diets, which shut down the fat-burning systems, with insulin resistance, which browns out the carbohydrate energy pathways, is a prescription for disaster.  Alzheimer’s disease is one way it can go down.

Do yourself a metabolic favor, flirt with ketosis and exercise both
of your body’s energy-generating systems.

3. Eat natto.

Or take nattokinase enzyme supplements from your health food store.  This isn’t something that you have to do all the time, unless it makes a huge difference for you.

If you take natto and nothing happens, then stop and go on to number 4.
But if your blood is too thick, like molasses in January, natto will thin it.
And you will probably notice—or your friends and family will notice.

The medical condition of thick blood is called coagulopathy,
and it is totally different than the tendency of the blood to clot.  Kaiser medical insurance usually won’t test for it, even though it is a fairly common pathology.

If you have thick blood, one week on nattokinase enzymes, 3-4 a day, will clear it up and restore full blood flow to the brain.  Coagulopathies are caused by infections, allergies, food sensitivities, leaky gut syndrome, gluten sensitivity, inflammatory triggers and estrogen dominance.  So this is not a rare or trivial problem.  Challenge yourself.  See if it does anything for you.

4.  Don’t forget your B3.  B3 is really important.

The active form of B3 is NADH, which is also called coenzyme 1.  It is the power cable that connects the Krebs energy cycle to the ATP-energy generating system.  Even though the body has two ways to make NADH,…

{overlay:  1. niacinamide (B3) double arrow niacin (B3) arrow NADH }

{overlay:  2. tryptophan (the essential amino acid) arrow NADH }

…both are spectacularly inefficient, which is why the RDA for B3 is so high.  So, hedge your bets, take some form of B3 in doses 10x higher than the RDA.  If you want to know more, go through the adjacent videos on the swfowkes channel, or do a web search for niacinamide and Alzheimer’s disease in Google.

{overlay:  search “niacinamide” and “Alzheimer’s disease”}

5.  Eat cold-water fatty fish on a regular basis.

This is one of the bizarre paradoxes of modern medicine, that a food with much-higher-than-average mercury content would protect against a disease that manifests through mercury toxicity.  But there is a good reason for this.  Fish contains fish oils, and cold-water fish contains fish oils that are particularly good as suppressing inflammation.  But a word of caution.  Fish oils are being heavily over-promoted, and they do have a dark side.

So do not fall into the more-is-merrier mentality.  The amount of fish oil in fish is rather low, so don’t take too much.

Also, fish oils go rancid if you look at then cross-eyed.  So taste-test them regularly.  If you notice an acrid or biting taste in the back center of your tongue, or if your gagging reflex is activated, your fish oil is rancid and should be thrown away.

If you just opened the bottle, go get your money back.

6.  Take 5000 IU of vitamin D3 with breakfast, or lunch.

Vitamin D is a real sleeper.  For years we have been told, mistakenly, to stay out of the sun to avoid skin cancer.  Now there is unequivocal evidence that regular sun exposure actually protects us from the vast majority of skin cancers, and the most dangerous of the lot.  It is sun *over*exposure that is dangerous.  So if you want to worry, worry about sunburn.

Vitamin D3 is so deeply involved in so many aspects of metabolism and the brain that we have to skip the deets here.  But two warnings.  First, the recommendations for high-dose calcium for osteoporosis, which doesn’t work by the way, is actually dangerous when you take an adequate dose of vitamin D3.  So take D3 and cut way down the calcium, to a few hundred milligrams at most.  Your bones will thank you.

Second, the D recommendation is strongly based on skin color.  The darker your skin, the more you need.  There is now clear evidence that many of the special health risks that are statistically associated with black heritage are directly tied to the greater deficiencies of vitamin D among blacks.  If you don’t believe, look it up.

7.  Eat cilantro on your salads.

Cilantro is a natural mercury excreter, which may lower your risks of Alzheimer’s disease.  Not everybody can take it, but if you like it, by all means incorporate it into your lifestyle.  If you can’t tolerate cilantro, get your alternative doctor to do a challenge test of your total-body mercury burden and see if DMPS, or lipoic acid, or colloidal zeolite, or liposomal glutathione will work for you

8.  Take a medium-potency B-complex vitamin at lunch.

This is pretty much straightforward.  It’s really too bad that so many people get too caught up in the glamorous supplements and ignore the workhorses.  You get more bang for your buck from B-complex vitamins that you would from any of the specialty supplements, except maybe selenium.

B1, B2 and B3 are directly involved in energy metabolism.  B5 is involved in strength and stamina.  B3, B6, B12 and folic acid are involved in genetic expression.  B12 is one of the most common deficiencies among the elderly.  All Bs are used by the brain.

But two words of advice; don’t take those B-25, B-50, or B-100 formulations,
which shortchange the B3, B5 and B12.  B3 and B12 are particularly important for Alzheimer’s disease.  Instead, look at the percent RDA numbers on the label.  If they are roughly comparable, and at least ten times the RDA, then you are making a good choice.

Lastly, B-vitamins don’t generally smell good, but they shouldn’t make you feel lightheaded when you open the bottle and catch a whiff.  If they smell bad, it’s probably because they are no longer fresh.  If you want to be a purist like me, find a company that makes Bs and multi’s by short-run manufacturing  (i.e., 6-12 times a year).  This way they are always fresh.

9.  Eat curry-spiced foods.

Alright, back into the ethnicity issue, again.  There is good reason that curry dishes are so popular in India.  Curry contains curcumin, which is an anti-inflammatory influence like fish oils.  There are multiple such anti-inflammatories, but few that taste so good.  If you want to expand upon this, take digestive enzymes with your meals, too.

10.  Take your daily multivitamin at lunch and dinner.

Again, it’s a bang for your buck issue.  Cover the basics.  Trust Mother nature.  She gets it right most of the time.

Well, that’s the top ten, in a bit more detail.

I hope it was worth your time.

If you’d like more information, read Dr. Mary Newport’s report of reversal of her husband Steve’s case of Alzheimer’s disease by coconut oil alone.  Their story is now out in book form.

(overlay web site URL, embed link)

You can also listen to my in-depth presentation on Alzheimer’s disease posted separately on this channel.

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So looking back, you can see that many of these things clearly require only a little time.

So it is true that you can prevent and reverse Alzheimer’s disease in your spare time.

So no joke.

But there may be some very pissed off drug executives that have spent billions to do what some plain, generic therapies can accomplish for a penny on the dollar.  Some of them are trying to illegalize the therapies I have just outlined.  It’s called Codex Alimentarius—or globalization of drug company supremacy.  My advice, don’t let them do it to you or yours.

Praise be for the Internet and free speech.

In joy and appreciation, of body and mind, this is Steve Fowkes signing off.

Hope you got a few chuckles.

9 thoughts on “Reversing Alzheimer’s Disease?”

    1. There is no clear evidence that the cholesterol/sphingolipid accumulation of Neimann-Pick diseases operates through the same mechanism as Alzheimer’s disease. The genetics suggest otherwise. Even though the reverse is likely (that the lipid disorder is an acute risk factor for the secondary development of Alzheimer’s pathology), it would be fortuitous that fat-burning mechanisms (ketosis or beta-oxidation) would retard or reverse the lipid-accumulation disorder, which is the underlying pathology. It’s possible, but not likely. I haven’t seen any research headed in this direction, but did not do an exhaustive search. Please let me know if anything develops along these lines.

  1. Hello Steve, can you name a few short run manufacturers of BComplex that fit the 10 X RDA? I am having trouble finding B complex other than the 50 and 100 formulations.

    Harold Foster the noted disease geographer who tracked the incidence of Alzheimer’s geographically found a corelation between areas with high acid rain and high free aluminum in the drinking water. The acidic ph of the water created a higher solubity of aluminum and a greater aluminum burden in the brain. This set up the inflammation which contributed to higher levels of Alzheimer’s in eastern coastal areas of Norway which recorded the world’ highest incidence of Alzheimer’s. This info was gleaned from his online book “What Really Causes Alzheimer’s?

    This goes back to your statements in your You tube Alzheimer series that inflammation from variable sources (mercury, delayed onset food allergies, alcohol/acetaldehyde, cortisol hyper activation, High aluminum, ) COMBINED with metabolism energy deficiencies create conditions that brain microglia and neurons cannot tolerate.

    What sort of home water treatment system could economically clear high levels of aluminum in drinking water?

    Cliff Colgan Nutrition Therapy Practitioner

    Please comment

    1. @Cliff. I wish I had a good answer for you. I’m currently taking a multi-vitamin (Nutra-6, from HFN-USA.com) which has 10x of B1, 2x of B2, 10x of B3, 20x of B5, 12x of B6, 10x of B12, 2x of folate (actually folinate, aka 5-formyl-THF), and 2x biotin. So I do not take a separate B-complex formula. I have seen good B-formulas online, but as far as I know none are short-run manufactured. HFN and VRP practiced short-run manufacturing, but now that they have been sold/purchased, it remains to be seen whether this will continue, especially given new onerous GMP regulations regarding batch testing courtesy of the FDA’s war-on-the-supplement-industry policies.

    2. @Cliff. I agree with you. Aluminum is an independent risk factor that affects the overall susceptibility of people to the critical glutathione failure that triggers Alzheimer’s disease. When the researchers at the University of Calgary tested aluminum, it did not cause the depolarization of the neural growth cones that was seen with mercury. Or at least it did not at any concentration that was biologically feasible. Only mercury showed the nuance of sensitivity. At the time, I was surprised at the fact that cadmium, like aluminum, did not show this effect. Unlike aluminum, which has a very different electronic structure from mercury, cadmium is very mercury-like. It has the same valences, the same exterior orbitals, the same affinity for sulfur that mercury does, but not the same magnitude of disruptive effect on microtubules (GTP binding off beta-tubulin).

      Anybody with high aluminum is going to have a high cross-linking burden and antagonism towards calcium and magnesium functions. So unloading aluminum can certainly be important. The classic allopathic approach is EDTA chelation therapy. If there is aluminum in your drinking water, filtering with activated charcoal (or reverse osmosis with mineral supplementation) can remove it, as can taking low-dose oral EDTA (oral chelation therapy). My only reservations about low-dose oral chelation is 1) the possibility of leaky-gut syndrome, which would allow some of the Al-EDTA chelate to pass through the lumen lining, and 2) possible interference in nutritional trace-mineral absorption. If you have raw water (well, stream, etc.) with aluminum in it, you can flocculate the aluminum out by adding biological substances which are cross-linked by aluminum and settle out in standing tanks or get filtered out by getting trapped in a filter matrix of sufficiently small size. Flocculation is the reason that many municipal water utilities ADD aluminum to the water, to reduce organic matter and filter out bacteria, microbes and biofilms. They use an excess of alum to get the biomatter burden as close to zero as possible, but by adding some biomatter, it takes the aluminum close to zero, instead.

  2. Thanks for the information above Steve. Yes, I did get a chuckle. Love your sense of humor.

    Like Cliff, I’m looking for a good source of fresh B’s.

    Also, any comments on the chloramine that’s added to the water in the Bay Area? Is there any way to remove it without resorting to a full blown reverse osmosis system? Sorry for the dumb question but I’m not a chemist. I do photons… 🙂

    OK, while I’m at it, how about cod liver oil as a source of D (and A)? Note that I eat a lot of grass fed butter, partly for the K. I’ve read that A, D, and K are all related but I don’t know the details.

    So many questions…. Could pick your brain for hours… 🙂

    Thanks in advance!

    Rick

    1. @Rick. You nailed the water-treatment problem. Chloramine can be removed with charcoal, but it takes far more charcoal that that needed to remove chlorine. So “stacking” charcoal filters in series is the solution that seems to be the most affordable solution.

      If you are talking about bath water, vitamin C will reduce chloramine just fine. Add a teaspoon or tablespoon to your bath water as you run the water, then wait long enough for the exhaust fan to remove the volatilized chloramine from the air.

      Shower systems are the problem. There is no way you can put ten charcoal filters in the water line and still have pressure. But I can suggest a kludge that might work: put a fan-driven fresh-air source immediately above the shower head pointing parallel to the shower stream. Maybe some kind of plastic dryer-vent tubing would work. This would create a laminar air flow of clean air just above the chloramine-contaminated air of the shower spray. Since this is where your head is, you can breath this air without having to join the circus to learn contortionism.

    2. I do not like cod liver oil because the PUFA content is too high. The risk of accelerating mitochondrial aging is just too high at the levels that would be needed to give me the A and D levels I want.

      It is my opinion that much of the perceived benefits of PUFAs are due to their ability to fluidize membranes and increase membrane permeability. For hypothyroid and hypometabolic individuals, this feels great. Higher energy, less brain fog, better mood. But accelerating mitochondrial aging is the deal breaker for me. For others, the skin-aging effects of PUFAs causing wrinkles is just as bad. I remain open to the possibility that high PUFAs might be efficiently accommodated with some kind of autophagy-cultivating lifestyle adaptation (intermittent protein fasting, for example). So keep the information flowing.

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