Alzheimer’s is linked to a commercially-promoted sugar-saturated diet
GEORGE MONBIOT, The Guardian (September 11, 2012)
Around 35 million people suffer from Alzheimer’s disease
worldwide(6); current projections, based on the rate at which
the population ages, suggest that this will rise to 100
million by 2050(7). But if, as many scientists now believe,
it is caused largely by the brain’s impaired response to
insulin, the numbers could rise much further. In the US, the
percentage of the population with diabetes type 2, which is
strongly linked to obesity, has almost trebled in 30
years(8). If Alzheimer’s, or “diabetes type 3”, goes the same
way, the potential for human suffering is incalculable.
Insulin is the hormone which prompts the liver, muscles and
fat to absorb sugar from the blood. Diabetes 2 is caused by
excessive blood glucose, resulting either from a deficiency
of insulin produced by the pancreas, or resistance to its
signals by the organs which would usually take up the
glucose.
The association between Alzheimer’s and diabetes 2 is long-
established: type 2 sufferers are two to three times more
likely to be struck by this dementia than the general
population(9). There are also associations between
Alzheimer’s and obesity(10) and Alzheimer’s and metabolic
syndrome (a complex of diet-related pathologies)(11).
Researchers first proposed that Alzheimer’s was another form
of diabetes in 2005. The authors of the original paper
investigated the brains of 54 corpses, 28 of which belonged
to people who had died of the disease(12). They found that
the levels of both insulin and insulin-like growth factors in
the brains of Alzheimer’s patients were sharply reduced by
comparison to those in the brains of people who had died of
other causes. Levels were lowest in the parts of the brain
most affected by the disease.
Their work led them to conclude that insulin and insulin-like
growth factor are produced not only in the pancreas but also
in the brain. Insulin in the brain has a host of functions:
as well as glucose metabolism, it helps to regulate the
transmission of signals from one nerve cell to another, and
affects their growth, plasticity and survival(13,14).
Experiments conducted since then appear to support the link
between diet and dementia(15,16,17,18), and researchers have
begun to propose potential mechanisms. In common with all
brain chemistry, these tend to be fantastically complex,
involving, among other impacts, inflammation, stress caused
by oxidation, the accumulation of one kind of brain protein
and the transformation of another(19,20,21,22). I would need
the next six pages of this paper even to begin to explain
them, and would doubtless get it wrong (if you’re interested,
please follow the links on my website).
Plenty of research still needs to be done. But if the current
indications are correct, Alzheimer’s disease could be another
catastrophic impact of the junk food industry, and the worst
discovered so far. Our governments, as they are in the face
of all our major crises, appear to be incapable of
responding.
In this country as in many others, the government’s answer to
the multiple disasters caused by the consumption of too much
sugar and fat is to call on both companies and consumers to
regulate themselves. Before he was replaced by someone even
worse, the former health secretary, Andrew Lansley, handed
much of the responsibility for improving the nation’s diet to
food and drinks companies: a strategy that would work only if
they volunteered to abandon much of their business(23,24).
A scarcely-regulated food industry can engineer its products
“loading them with fat, salt, sugar and high fructose corn
syrup ” to bypass the neurological signals which would
otherwise prompt people to stop eating(25). It can bombard
both adults and children with advertising. It can (as we
discovered yesterday) use the freedoms granted to academy
schools to sell the chocolate, sweets and fizzy drinks now
banned from sale in maintained schools(26). It can kill the
only effective system (the traffic light label) for informing
people how much fat, sugar and salt their food contains. Then
it can turn to the government and blame consumers for eating
the products it sells. This is class war: a war against the
poor fought by the executive class in government and
industry.
We cannot yet state unequivocally that poor diet is a leading
cause of Alzheimer’s disease, though we can say that the
evidence is strong and growing. But if ever there was a case
for the precautionary principle, here it is. It’s not as if
we lose anything by eating less rubbish. Averting a possible
epidemic of this devastating disease means taking on the
bullies: those who mock people for their pathologies and
those who spread the pathologies by peddling a lethal diet.
— Excerpt provided as fair use of copyrighted materials. The article may be read in its entirety at www.monbiot.com
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