Brain Power Food

The latest evidence is finding that Alzheimer’s disease is actually a slow starvation of the brain.  Is appears that the brain has its own blood sugar regulation mechanism.  It does not depend on the body’s system. For example, if you have a low blood sugar episode due to excess exercise that uses up the available sugar for the muscles, the brain will still continue to function. The brain has its own insulin production, separate from that produced by the pancreas for the rest of the body.  Strangely enough this means that your brain can develop diabetes even though the rest of the body is fine.  This is what is now believed to be the cause of Alzheimer’s – brain diabetes.

Insulin acts to open the doorways of the nerve cells to sugar so the cells can form the energy they need to function.  With the diet of our modern world, the insulin production in the brain drops or the nerve cells become resistant to the insulin and the cells literally starve. Why do I say “With the diet of our modern world”?  Because the body and the brain don’t need sugar to function.  They will burn fats.  In fact they prefer to burn fats; fats create less metabolic waste in the form of free radicals as they burn.  But the body will always burn sugars first, because sugar floating around in the blood stream is toxic.  So the body burns it up as energy.  But in this modern world, we eat a diet full of sugars and carbs that become sugars. Unfortunately the fats we eat are not in the form the body can easily use for fuel.  It will use fats for fuel only if you stay on a low carb diet. This is the best prevention for dementia available.

If you eat more than twenty grams of carbs a day or the equivalent of a medium apple or 4 cups of broccoli, fat as an energy source cannot be utilized by the brain.  By comparison, the heart burns fats almost exclusively.  It is too busy pumping all the time to deal with the free radicals produced by burning sugars.  This is the big problem with Alzheimer’s and dementia – these folks eat too many carbs for the brain to switch over to burning fats for energy.  The fats don’t need the insulin to get into the cells for energy production like the sugars do.  So even if there is a “brain diabetes” problem, your brain could be fine if you gave it enough fats of a type it could burn without sugar being present to stop the process.

But wait, there is a type of fat that your brain will use for energy even if there is sugar around.  It is not a fat that most people in the western world use.  It is a portion of the oil from coconuts called Medium Chain Triglycerides, or MCTs for short.  The coconut “cure” for Alzheimer’s made all the news outlets a couple years back.  And I suppose if you are really motivated, you will down the tablespoons of coconut oil every day you need to feed the brain.  But eating it straight is pretty gross.  I do make chocolates out of it, which works fine.  I will even use it in cooking.  But applications where you really need a liquid oil, coconut “oil” just does not do the job.  A good example. I tried to make a coconut oil mayonnaise. Once it cooled down in the fridge it turned to a hard lump… not a good mayonnaise.

Well I could not leave well enough alone, so I researched MCTs and found a source that was not outrageously expensive. In the stores I was finding 8 ounce bottles for $10 to $15.  That made some really expensive mayonnaise, but it worked just fine.  So I bought a big 5 gallon container of the MCT oil and have broken that down into quart jars for my patients for only $20 a jar.  I call this Brain Power Food.  Susie says it looks like moonshine sitting on the shelves at the office, but I assure you it is MCT oil.