MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE
by Michael Wolraich
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Hits of the Day
Alzheimer's could be the most catastrophic impact of junk food
By A Guy Called LULU on Mon, 09/10/2012 - 6:27pm |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.
URL:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/sep/10/alzheimers-junk-food-catastrophic-effect
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Comments
by A Guy Called LULU on Mon, 09/10/2012 - 6:30pm
The 2 parents I dealt with recently with Alzheimer's didn't eat excessive sweets (one not at all), and didn't take in saccharin or other artificial sweeteners.
Fat is good because it stops you from eating too much - you feel full. Yes, there are healthier fats and worse fats it seems. But it also has nothing to do with insulin, except if you eat more fat and fewer carbohydrates, you don't get as overloaded with sugar, whether "natural" or "unnatural". Which I think has been successful on some diets, whereas other diets just say "go hungry".
On salt, well, one did one didn't.
(it might be guessed that we used to eat a ton of sugar without as much detriment as the wave of corn syrup and saccharin and various preservatives)
What's happening in other cultures such as India and China, where access and diet choices were quite different?
I'm more looking forward to the lessons from parsing "Junk DNA" as I think all of the analysis at this point is pretty poorly based.
by PeraclesPlease on Tue, 09/11/2012 - 2:55am
Whatevah kinda DNA, it could also be that the DNA you actually got is affected or triggered or whatever you want to call it by how well your father or mother were fed before pubetry:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/09/opinion/sunday/why-fathers-really-matt...
So there you go, we shouldn't be too quick to blame modern diets or modern anything; the epidemic of "Alzheimers" could also be due to the diets of 1935.
( A good portion of the epidemic could also be seniors drugged to the gills by numerous Medicare fee-for-service-paid specialists with nobody acting as gatekeeper, i.e. blood thinners, blood pressure reducers, statins, pain meds, blood sugar regulators and other sundries. They don't have a definitive test for "Alzheimers," so how the heck do they know it's not the drugs without taking someone with symptoms off of them? But that's a whole 'nother argument.)
A couple decades of dealing with bad diagnoses for self, family and friends and the research I did because of that (even pre-internet) made me a firm believer that preventive medicine is in still very much in its infancy and shouldn't be trusted. You are the final decider, they never know for sure. It's a crap shoot whether the advice you get will stand a test of time. It takes a couple decades cumulative experience to see the enormity of the lack of true knowledge, but you eventually see it--
I. E.: Oops, we shouldn't have taken all those kids tonsils out, oops we were wrong that people should eat margarine, instead of animal fats; oops there's two kinds of cholesterol, not one, and one is good; oops all those alternative medicine people we called flakes about trans fats and inflammation and auto-immune reactions weren't flakes after all; oops maybe salt intake doesn't do what we think it did; oops maybe gettting a mammogram/PSA/colonoscopy/pap smear every year is more detrimental than helpful; oops, everyone take Vitamin E, oops no don't take Vitamin E; oops we waz wrong on how the body absorbs calcium; oops maybe we shouldn't be handing out statins like candy on Halloween.....
They really don't understand very much at all yet how things work with the human body, spend some time visiting patients in the ICU and you'll see what all their high tech wonders can do and can't--mostly can't, mostly make for iatrogenic illness along with some care. Rather than understand what is actually going on a chemical and molecular biological level, which they do not in most cases--current medicine relies on trial and error with test groups--like I said, we are all guinea pigs subject to a very primitive art of medicine. To have a doctor that is a genius artist practitioner in these primitive arts, or to at least have a set of them that work as a team, is to be very lucky.
by artappraiser on Tue, 09/11/2012 - 9:11am
I agree with most of what you say except that in your conclusion you seem to be conflating medical practitioners who learned part of what was known some years ago, and deal with issues based on that limited knowledge, with researchers exploring new ground. Surely you agree that research has moved the field forward both in understanding and in technique. I would guess that medical science will understand more about Alzheimer's disease ten years from now and I will not be surprised if it finds improved ways of both dealing with it and preventing or delaying it in the first place.
by A Guy Called LULU on Tue, 09/11/2012 - 9:33am
I'd put it this way about how I think: a lot of the scientific research over the last few years has made it ever clearer that the practice of medicine, especially preventive medicine, is still in its infancy. In that way I agree there is progress.
I feel we have immense progress in that folks have the internet to find out, from reports of that research, that their doctors are not gods as they once were commonly purported to be. That info is no longer only available at specialized libraries.
Cavaet: I also think too much research is still funded with motives, including ,but not exclusively, the profit motive, that skew things in bad directions. (For example, there's actually downside in the information revolution as far as science goes: fads are larger and affect more, and scientists are not immune to them.)
On the comment on the artful practice of medicine, I mean that there are rare doctors who have great talent at wholistic medicine. Medicine is never going to be a true science, because our bodies (as science is discovering more and more each day) are all incredibly individual. Perhaps an example will help explain what I am trying to say: what is a very bad diet for you may be a good diet for someone else or at least not very harmful.
by artappraiser on Tue, 09/11/2012 - 10:13am
P.S. A lot of poor medicine currently is due to over-reliance on highly scientific testing based on current knowledge about what is "bad for you" that may be faulty. I.E., just because there is a spinal compression on that MRI does not necessarily mean that is where the pain is coming from, they often have no way to truly tell where the pain is coming from, but they operate anyway and the person still has the original pain and side effects from the operation.
Or current procedure is to remove all cysts and the like when found on a colonoscopy, presuming they could be pre-cancerous according to current conventional wisdom. Well, maybe those cysts are there because that body needs them to do it's own thing with cleansing, something they don't understand yet. A good young doctor I know has a great saying: we treat the patient, not the test.
by artappraiser on Tue, 09/11/2012 - 10:31am
I would not attempt to defend the theory presented in the article, that would be pretty silly for me or for almost any medical layman to do, just as silly as rejecting it out of hand would be. I do think that the article presents the developing theory better than most mass media reporting on medical research that may or may not be entering onto significant new ground. The author does not overstate the evidence, IMO, but does give multiple references for those interested in pursuing the subject further. He makes it clear that nothing has been proven but that he has gone well beyond a single report by a single person or research group and that, in his opinion, the evidence "...is strong and growing."
I can easily understand personal experience differing with the average of a group study and your experience, while being about as personal as possible, is also taken from the second smallest sampling possible. I don't believe anybody is claiming that diet is the only cause of what they are starting to call 'Type Three Diabetes'.
by A Guy Called LULU on Tue, 09/11/2012 - 9:19am