New York Times Front Page article links Alzheimer's Disease to Sugar.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/24/well/eat/sugary-drinks-brain-aging.ht...

It's only a matter of time before every known modern disease is linked to the same cause, excess sugar and processed fats. The USDA food pyramid is making everyone sick. Slow information leak to avoid liability. Read up on Epigenetics.

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Without letting the NYT drop cookies on me. Fuck the NYT.
As for sugar, I've been telling people it's bad for decades(and I'm a sugar junkie in recovery). They take out the good stuff and replace it with sugar so we'll eat their junk. Heart disease, diabetes, obesity are the results.
Fuck their food, too!

peace

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Ya got to be a Spirit, cain't be no Ghost. . .

Explain Bldg #7. . . still waiting. . .

If you’ve ever wondered whether you would have complied in 1930’s Germany,
Now you know. . .
sign at protest march

@Tall Bald and Ugly The web works on cookies. There isn't any web site that doesn't use cookies.

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"Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies." - Groucho

@the_poorly_educated by it don't mean I have to let them track me. Cookies are disabled on all my devices so when I leave a site, I'm gone, hopefully.
Does it do any good? Heh.

peace

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Ya got to be a Spirit, cain't be no Ghost. . .

Explain Bldg #7. . . still waiting. . .

If you’ve ever wondered whether you would have complied in 1930’s Germany,
Now you know. . .
sign at protest march

The number of die from a disease is less critical to me than the number who languish in despair for 10 years or more. This should be at the top of the list for research.

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"Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich."--Napoleon

@dkmich It's all preventable. The research has been done except the threshold is very high to disprove the current dogma unlike the threshold to set the current USDA guidlines which there were none. It's a Big agri, big pharma, big AMA scam.

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"Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies." - Groucho

gulfgal98's picture

@dkmich for twelve long years before he died at the age of 92. He never drank sodas or similar sugary beverages. He did eat dessert every now and then, but not every day and he did love a piece of dark chocolate after dinner.

This is the first time I have heard of sugar leading to dementia and Alzheimer's. I personally believe we do not know exactly what causes Alzheimer's just as we do not know exactly what causes many other diseases. I had read that dementia and Alzheimer's tends to run in families which would lead me to believe there is a genetic correlation.

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Do I hear the sound of guillotines being constructed?

“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." ~ President John F. Kennedy

Alligator Ed's picture

@gulfgal98 @gulfgal98 Diabetes, alone, does not cause dementia but is associated with higher rates of dementia in populations otherwise similar. The cause of Alzheimer's diseases is still unknown. One genetic subtype, positive apo-e4, is associated with much higher dementia rates but:
1. not all carriers of apo-e4 get Alzheimer's dementia
2. people without apo-e4 get Alzheimer's disease

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@Alligator Ed That is exactly what epigenetics is about. Just because you have "the gene" doesn't mean you will get a particular disease. You need to put your body into the right type of evironment to give those genes the opportunity to express themselves. The western/American diet is that environment and people are expressing those traits in many ways , aka, modern diseases.

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"Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies." - Groucho

@the_poorly_educated did you happen to read the same article? The Grim Biology of Being Poor. Blew my mind, what's left of it. Lots of bells ringing.

My neighbor is absolutely convinced we change our DNA at will, it is simply a matter of understanding. If only I could realize that, everything would be fine and dandy. I spend too much time being pissed about becoming yet another statistic, unable to beat the odds of my childhood, despite working myself half to death. Fuck that shit. Oh well. My neighbor is flush with her husband's UPS income, he is three short years from retiring. Age 50, way to go! Joined the Teamsters out of college because why not. Back then it meant something, now not so much. Billionaires and their robots aren't hiding the future they're bringing. Get as much as you can before it's all gone.

Why Poverty Is Like a Disease
Emerging science is putting the lie to American meritocracy.
By Christian H. Cooper Photography by Nathan Cooper April 20, 2017

On paper alone you would never guess that I grew up poor and hungry.

My most recent annual salary was over $700,000. I am a Truman National Security Fellow and a term member at the Council on Foreign Relations. My publisher has just released my latest book series on quantitative finance in worldwide distribution.

None of it feels like enough though. I feel as though I am wired for a permanent state of fight or flight, waiting for the other shoe to drop, or the metaphorical week when I don’t eat. I’ve chosen not to have children, partly because—despite any success—I still don’t feel I have a safety net. I have a huge minimum checking account balance in mind before I would ever consider having children. If you knew me personally, you might get glimpses of stress, self-doubt, anxiety, and depression. And you might hear about Tennessee.
...

Permanent state of fight or flight, yep. Try that every day for fourteen years. No wonder I'm skinny and done.
NP: Carole King - It's too late

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riverlover's picture

a month before she died (of renal failure). What that meant was that she had spent 5 years with an incorrect diagnosis, not that it mattered but Lewy Body Dementia causes hallucinations, and she had plenty. And would describe them to me and my sister. Not scary to her, just odd. Like a flame floating in the refrigerator. And faceless marchers wearing pink and black tartans in her back yard.

It's Parkinson's advanced. She had few tremors. Nothing can be done. By the time of her death she was surrounded by dead friends, sometime in the 1930's or 40's.

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Hey! my dear friends or soon-to-be's, JtC could use the donations to keep this site functioning for those of us who can still see the life preserver or flotsam in the water.

Alligator Ed's picture

Diabetics, both types 1 and 2, have higher incidences of dementia of all types. People with the metabolic syndrome (obesity, hyperlipidemia, and diabetes) are hit hard not only by stroke and heart attack but by cognitive dysfunction.

The American Diabetes Association, AMA, and USDA are all complicit to some degree in this situation. A truly beneficial diet is high unsaturated fat, high protein, low carbohydrate diet, supplemented by Vitamin D and the vitamins. (Vitamin K2, which is not a pro-coagulant like K1, reduces arterial lipid and calcium deposition). Vitamin B6 is often deficient in people with glucose intolerance (warning: in some cases Vitamin B6 can cause permanent sensory neuropathy; however blood levels are readily available).

Many certified dietitians (nutritionists) are sadly underinformed about the situation.

Proper eating habits will not prevent most cases of dementia but will delay clinical worsening for many years.

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@Alligator Ed @Alligator Ed
(grr, edited to add HTML "entities" for the less-than and greater-than symbols)

something very, very peculiar in their results. They divide their subjects into three categories:
A. < 1 sugary beverage / day
B. 1-2 sugary beverages / day
C. > 2 sugary beverages / day
(if you're wondering, they include fruit juice as a sugary beverage.)

Group C consumes, on average, 35% more calories than Group A, including almost 20% more fats. HOWEVER: They report that Group C vs Group A
are 4% diabetic, vs 9%
have 98 mg/dl fasting blood glucose, vs 100 mg/dl
have a 0.9 waist-to-hip ratio vs 0.9
have systolic BP of 122, vs 120
have HDL of 52.4 mg/dl, vs 58.9
are being treated for hypertension at 22% vs 25%

In other words, the group that consumes the most sugar, and by far the most calories, appears to be as healthy or healthier than the group that consumes the least.

ONE IMPORTANT NOTE: Group C is 41% female, vs 61% in Group A. This would account for a big chunk of the difference in caloric intake, but it makes NO sense in terms of the waist-to-hip ratio.

Muy mysterioso, unless I'm misreading their report ...

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The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.

Alligator Ed's picture

@UntimelyRippd
1. Sugary drinks: juices, such as orange, are 50% sugar.
2. The cut off for too much and too little seem arbitrary, since the differences between groups A nd C are so little different. This leads to suspicion that group A and group C are artificially separated from each other. Different thresholds should be applied. A better cut off would be zero sugary drinks for comparison with other categories.
3. A difference in diabetes of 5% IS SIGNIFICANT. In other words, diabetes incidence is 225% in Group A compared to Group C.
4. As suggested above, there should be a category of zero sugary drinks.
5. Although calories do count, they are less important than the carb to total calorie ratio. The lower this ratio, the better.
6. Waist to hip measurements are supposed to account for visceral fat (bad) to non-visceral fat (not as bad). The problem with waist to hip measurements is that they are meaningless as a total group statistic. W@hat is important is an individual's waist to hip ratio over time. Different body types account for some of the discrepancy. "Apples" compared to "pears". This most commonly applies to women. Apples have rounder middles, hence more visceral fat with its increased morbidity and mortality. Pears are people whose main fat accumulations are in the buttocks and thighs, which while not beneficial, is not as much of a cardiovascular/cancer risk factor as the apple configuration.

Just as you should be wary of taking your political advice from NYT, so should you be wary of accepting their health advice. Remember: war is not healthy for children or other living things.

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@Alligator Ed
the correction I just made -- I ran afoul of HTML formatting.

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The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.

@Alligator Ed
aspect of the result, precisely because the group with lowest consumption of sugary drinks has startlingly higher rates of diabetes. i'm wondering whether a closer reading of the accompanying discussion will reveal that a large subset of diabetics has already been excluded from the sample, for some reason.

my confusion respecting the waist-to-hip ratio is that regardless of other factors, i would expect that on average over two populations, a population dominated by women who don't eat a lot of calories OR sugar would have a lower waist-to-hip ratio than a population dominated by men who do. instead, the numbers are identical.

the cutoffs indeed seem "arbitrary", particularly given that the researchers' survey included NINE categorical values.

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The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.

"eat the least of these" apex of the diagram, so i'm not sure what you're getting at there.

also, i don't know what you mean by "modern disease", but if what you mean is diseases other than those caused by bacteria, acute viral infection, parasites, and inherited defects in genetic sequence -- then you're still probably wrong. i don't doubt that sugar is pretty bad for us, but it is not the primary cause of most (if any) cancers, it is probably not the primary cause of atherosclerosis or most other non-diabetes-related vascular diseases, it is probably not the primary cause of asthma or allergies or arthritis or the general range of autoimmune diseases, etc etc

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The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.

@UntimelyRippd Then hpw do you explain a PET scan?

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"Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies." - Groucho

@the_poorly_educated
assuming you are not asking for an explanation of the principles behind positron-emission tomography, my answer is, show me a collection of PET scans that implicate excessive sugar consumption in any of the diseases i listed above, and i'll worry about how to explain it.

i'm not challenging the results of this latest study. i looked at the paper and although there are some curiosities, i'm not expert enough to get my dander up, certainly not without a much closer reading. moreover, as i said, i've no doubt that lots of sugar is bad for us; in fact, i was at a talk a few years ago when a high-ranking administrator from the EPA asserted that we were going to be seeing some very ugly numbers coming forth in studies on HFCS. his bottom line: don't eat it.

up
0 users have voted.

The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.