My mother turned 91 last week. I decided to give her a rather unusual birthday present – a fast! She has been complaining about having trouble with her memory lately. I have been there so I know how unpleasant that can be. My memory was down the tubes about 17 years ago. I could not remember from day to day what I had done the day before. My long term memory was fine, so all my clinical knowledge was still present, but the ability to record new memories was shot. In my case, this was due to an auto-immune reaction I was having to gluten and dairy. Once I got rid of those my memory came back. But it took several years to figure this out and really clean up my diet. When I go back and watch movies again that I saw back then, it is like I am seeing them for the first time. Yet old episodes of Star Trek I saw back when I was in high school are still crystal clear.
The memory difficulties my mother is experiencing are most likely due to the toxic buildup of plaque in the brain. These are not poisons like lead or mercury or pesticides, but accumulations of misfolded proteins gumming up the works. Proteins are like knitted articles of clothing. They are made of long strings of amino acids that are then bent and folded into intricate shapes just like what happens to yarn as you knit it into the shape you want. Misfolded proteins are what happens when the instructions on how to form the amino acid strings get scrambled for various reasons. You end up with a bunch of odd-shaped “clothing” that does not fit right and has arms and legs in the wrong places. These proteins are the communicators that make everything happen in the brain. When they are wrong, the brain is wrong. One common result is memory problems.
When you have these scrambled proteins hanging around they call it plaque, because it just clings to the action areas on the brain cells and keeps them from working properly. The only “cure” for this is to remove this plaque. Tons of research money is going into finding a drug that will do this job, but so far nothing has done the job. Fortunately, mother nature provides us a way to clean this junk protein out on our own – autophagy. Autophagy is Greek for “self-eating”. Literally, you mobilize your body to eat up those junk proteins and clean house. With the garbage cleaned away, your system is able to work more normally.
So what causes autophagy? You guessed it, fasting. When you have no food at all for 2 or 3 days, your body starts eating up nonessential tissues to free up the amino acids to repair other tissues that need to function. Part of what it eats up is the junk proteins in the brain. It does this all over the body. Fasting is the most powerful intervention we have to improve health and increase longevity. However, most of us do not like to fast. Consuming water only for at least five days in order to start cleaning out the brain is quite a challenge for any age person, much less a 91-year-old lady. Fortunately a number of years ago researchers began to study this fasting thing a little more closely and discovered that this autophagy process is controlled by something called mTOR and AMPK, and the balance between the hormones insulin and glucagon. These in turn could be triggered by a lack of two amino acids – leucine and isoleucine. So getting the body into fasting autophagy is really about eliminating protein foods containing those amino acids and lowering mTOR and insulin by lowering carbs and calories. The good news from all the science is that we do not need to do a complete water fast to achieve a state of autophagy to clean up junk in the brain. We just have to get rid of carb/sugar foods and protein foods. Said another way, we can still eat fiber foods (non-starchy veggies) and some fats (like coconut, olive, and avocado oils) and reap the benefits of autophagy.
This is my birthday present: guiding my mother through the process of this fast mimicking diet to help her brain. The goal is to spend 10 days each month cleaning up her system to improve her memory. This will not happen overnight. We might get 2 to 5% of the garbage cleaned out with each go-around. But gradually the clogged up brain pathways will start working better. Would this work better if we had started 20 years ago – you betcha. But people rarely anticipate future problems with enough emotion to provide the motivation to spend the first 10 days of every month on a special diet for years to prevent a problem down the road. We prefer to believe that “it won’t happen to us” so we do not need to endure the deprivation necessary to prevent these types of problems. People tend to wait until they really have a problem before doing anything about it. The earliest signs of oncoming Alzheimer’s show up 20 years before you start losing your memory.
Mom’s Protocol:
Day 1 to 5 Carnivore/ allergy clear
Eat only beef, mutton/lamb, buffalo, or goat, plus real salt
Day 6 to 10 Fiber & fat one day’s food:
Eat 5 cups cruciferous veggies (cabbage, cauliflower, broccoli, kale, Brussels sprouts), ½ to 1 cup mushrooms, ½ onion, 3-4 cloves garlic, leeks, chives
Flax porridge
Salads of leafy green lettuces, cucumber, celery, radish with oil & vinegar dressing – use only olive oil, avocado oil, or coconut oil. Spices: non-seed spices. Beverages: organic coffee, tea, herbal teas, mineral water, lemon water.
Day 11 to 30/31
Normal organic low carb diet.
The purpose of day 1 through 5 is to push the body into nutritional ketosis, as well as to eliminate as many of the food toxin reactions as possible. This protocol is what was considered the gold standard for food allergy clearing back in the ’40s and ’50s. Many people now live on this carnivore diet all the time as it has been found to be the best way to calm down auto-immune disorders. We want the body in nutritional ketosis because from there it only takes about 18 hours for the body to slip into autophagy. Without this step, it can take 2 to 3 days to get into autophagy resulting in a loss of benefit for the largest portion of the time you are on the fiber & fat protocol. Current evidence says that even with no carbs or proteins, you still need to keep your total calorie consumption below 700 to 800 calories per day to achieve autophagy. This is the challenge. Even though your tummy will be full of food, your brain will be telling you that you are not satisfied. Ketosis helps with this, as your brain will have all the energy it needs to be happy. The EGCG in green tea also helps cut any hunger pains.
A big bonus from this detox protocol is that while you are doing the fiber & fat 5 days, your body will be ramping up production of growth hormone immensely, waiting for the introduction of protein on day 11 to shuttle out a boatload of stem cells to repair old worn-out tissues throughout your body. The fat & fiber days will also be stimulating detoxification all over the body. The fat will promote bile secretion which will dump the poisons into the small intestine where the cruciferous veggies, mushrooms, and onion family veggies will grab the poisons and carry them out of the body. These veggies are also the ones that stimulate toxin breakdown in the liver for excretion into the bile.
I described this process a year or two ago in a newsletter called the “Fountain of Youth”. This is a perfect description of this process. It is the best method we have at this time for turning back the clock on our body. It makes a great New Years’ resolution for 2021 as it only involves a small 10-day commitment. Once you see that it is quite doable, consider trying it again in a month. My goal is to make it a lifestyle, like the eating only a couple of meals a day I am working on now. 2020 was such a waste. Let’s make up for it by supercharging 2021!
Take care,
David