Reuters reports that Research on mice links fast food to Alzheimer's:
LONDON (Reuters) - Mice fed junk food for nine months showed signs of developing the abnormal brain tangles strongly associated with Alzheimer's disease, a Swedish researcher said on Friday.
The findings, which come from a series of published papers by a researcher at Sweden's Karolinska Institutet, show how a diet rich in fat, sugar and cholesterol could increase the risk of the most common type of dementia.
No surprise to readers of this (or many other blogs), but then we get what seems like an ingrained and not particularly scientific comment from the researcher:
"We now suspect that a high intake of fat and cholesterol in combination with genetic factors ... can adversely affect several brain substances, which can be a contributory factor in the development of Alzheimer's."
Whoa! What happened to sugar? Where did the refined carbohydrates go? TheScientist.com reported:
Neurodegeneration research turns to insulin for answers
In 2005, while testing the effects of impaired insulin signaling on the brain, Suzanne de la Monte at Brown University and her colleagues observed several unexpected phenomena in her experimental mice. Hallmarks of neurodegenerative disease had surfaced: oxidative stress, amyloid fibrils, and cell loss. "It was the craziest thing," de la Monte says. Glucose metabolism and Alzheimer's had been linked previously, says de la Monte, and perhaps her findings explained why.
I grant that someone should ban transfats (Mayor Bloomberg in NY has started to do so), but the problem looks more like insulin regulation than it does cholesterol intake.
One wonders about how little researchers in the same fields pay attention to what others have discovered.
Alpha^2
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