Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a neurodegenerative disease that has been increasingly making its way to the forefront of devastating diseases in our society. It’s likely that many of us know someone who is affected by AD, yet the exact mechanisms are not well understood and there is no current effective cure. Alzheimer’s disease exhibits severe dementia as a result of the degradation of neurons and synapses in the brain. AD is a disease that not only harshly affects those who have the disease, but also those who are left to care for and look after those who have it.
The causes of AD are not entirely known. There are countless pathways that are thought to contribute to the eventual build up of amyloid plaques and neurofibrillary tangles. The amyloid plaques build ups of the beta amyloid protein and the tangles result from the build up of a wrongly phosphorylated tau protein. Pictured above is a comparison of a healthy human brain and a brain of an individual with severe AD. It is easy to see the damage done to neurons as a result of AD, and one can probably imagine the consequences of such neuronal damage.
So what do we do about this? Shouldn’t science was supposed to have an answer to these problems. Do we all just wait around our whole lives and hope that we don’t get Alzheimer’s and essentially lose our minds? It turns out that there are certain things we can do to help prevent it. In particular, our diets might be a good place to start.
To say that eating your vegetables will protect you from getting AD later in life would be a bit of a stretch. However, there are some significant ties between those who have unhealthy diets and those who develop Alzheimer’s. A primary result of consistently eating unhealthy food is obesity, which has been on the upshot as of late. In turn, many obese people develop insulin resistance and type-2 diabetes. This has a whole set of consequences in itself, but there have been distinct connections made between those who are insulin resistant and those who develop AD.
Could our diets really have an effect on our health to the extent of Alzheimer’s disease? I feel like we could all admit that we could eat a little better. Sometimes it’s just easier to grab McDonalds on the way home or eat a bag of chips in the car. Our society has a very “go-go-go” attitude about everything, including food. It’s also difficult to see the long term affects that eating a bag of Doritos every other day has on us until it’s basically too late. Personally, I would love to eat healthier food. However, I’m broke college student. When I go to the store it’s much easier to buy a frozen pizza than some organic sugar peas. I think it’s primarily a problem of our society, and our diets seem to play a much larger role in our overall health than we probably realize.
Alzheimer's Disease: the good, the bad, and The Big Mac
