Alzheimer’s Disease: Type 3 Diabetes?

Recently one of my close family members was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease, and it got me thinking about the different research on the subject that I have been seeing emerge recently.

One of the major theories of why Alzheimer’s Disease can emerge in some people has to do with something that I’ve talked about a lot in other Lunch Hour Lessons, and that is blood sugar regulation. Some researchers are now associating Alzheimer’s Disease with Type 3 Diabetes. Why would that be?

It is important to first understand how heavily the brain relies upon glucose for fuel. In humans, the brain accounts for about 2% of the body weight, but it consumes about 20% of glucose-derived energy, making it the main consumer of glucose out of all our organs.

Glucose is the simple sugar that all other sugars (and foods) break down into. Remember that all food intake eventually turns into glucose – fats, proteins, and carbohydrates can all be converted into glucose when needed for fuel.

Because of that, we don’t really need to eat a lot of carbyhydrate sourced glucose in its pure form. What happens in our American population is that we eat an imbalance of carbohydrate foods at the expense of foods rich in healthy fats or protein.

We’ve been conditioned away from adding fat to our food, in the form of butter, cream, and lard, and eating high protein meats, out of a misguided belief that these will make us fat and give us heart disease.

So instead, we often provide our bodies with fuel from mostly high-carbohydrate sources, some of which are considered “healthy” like low-fat grains and fruit, and others which aren’t, like sugary sodas and pastries.

Eating a daily fat-free oatmeal breakfast with orange juice, and then making a habit out indulging in sugary treats, means that a large amount of glucose quickly hits the bloodstream in a repeated fashion.