Highlights from Jonathan Otto's interview with Dr. Daniel Nuzum, for the Depression & Anxiety Series.
Alzheimer's is a deadly condition. It can be fatal. As the brain degenerates, so does control of bodily functions, and when it gets to a certain point, it can be fatal.
But talk about the brain, let's talk about what affects the brain by way of degeneration. What causes the brain to start to fall apart like this. Let's see what different contributing factors that we know exist here.
So, number one. Number one is nutritional deficiency. In Alzheimer's, you have brains that are devoid of very key nutrients, like essential fatty acids, B vitamins, certain minerals. In conjunction with the nutritional deficiencies, there's also increased amounts of heavy metals that are deposited in the brains of people with Alzheimer's. And these heavy metal deposits seem to be a major contributing factor to the amyloid protein deposits that happen in the brains with people with Alzheimer's.
My favorite analogy of what heavy metals do to tissues is, heavy metals do to your cells what a splinter does to the bottom of your foot. Consider a splinter stuck in your foot. It hurts. It causes inflammation. It causes infection. It causes irritation and the area swells up. It gets all irritated, infected, inflamed, all these all at one time.
So, let me give you an analogy here. Heavy metals affect your cells the same way a sliver would affect the bottom of your foot. If you have a sliver in the bottom of your foot, it causes irritation, inflammation and then infection. Infection sets in. Right? You have this cycle, as the infection clears up, the immune system clears that up, reduces the inflammation. The irritation's still there, so with time it becomes inflamed again. Then it gets infected again. And then, that whole cycle just keeps going and going and going as long as the sliver's there. Until you pull the sliver out, you're gonna have irritation, your gonna have inflammation, your gonna have infection. It's gonna be a cycle. You're gonna just continually get these three eyes, as I call them.
In your cells, a similar thing happens if they're toxic with heavy metals. Heavy metals act as that irritant and keep causing the cells to become inflamed. In other words, they become inflamed, the become more easy to infect and when they become infected, they die off. And this same process happens in all of our cells. If all of our cells, whether they're neurons in our brain, or tissue in our finger, that process will go on, if they are toxic.
There's two particular heavy metal toxin compounds that massively affect our brains and nervous system. One is the combination of fluoride and mercury. The other one is the combination of fluoride and aluminum. These compounds, when they come into contact with each other and create a compound in our body, and they float up into our brain, they cause neuron death. They kill brain cells. As they kill those brain cells, proteins are deposited in those areas and we have what are called the amyloid protein deposits. And those amyloid protein deposits don't contain memories, and they don't allow us to access memories either. And so they cause memory disfunction and we call that Alzheimer's disease.
That's one of the methods, one of the processes that can cause Alzheimer's. There is an "autoimmune" component to Alzheimer's where there are ... There's such inflammation in the brain that as the immune system is trying to clean up the inflammation, it actually does cause damage to the brain. Then, when we have this condition, where we have nutritional deficiencies, and these toxicities, particularly heavy metal toxicities, it affects the brain deeper and deeper and deeper. And the longer that goes on, the more damage that occurs in the brain. And we end up with memory issues.
One of the things that I've seen over the years that's been very helpful for people with Alzheimer's, is we start to do heavy metal detoxing. We do detoxing in general, heavy metal detoxing, where we're doing things that are gonna pull those heavy metals out of the system, while at the same time, giving them nutrients. The body can't heal itself effectively if it doesn't have the raw materials to rebuild itself. If you remove toxins and don't replace them with nutrients, all you have is a hole. You take the toxin out, there's a place for things to get stuck into again. If you don't fill that with nutrients, all you have to do is get exposed to the toxins again, and they go right back to where they were originally.
Trying to make these concepts real simple here. So heavy metal exposure, heavy metal toxicity is one, in my opinion, one key component to the development of Alzheimer's. There's another issue that we have in our environment, in particularly in the United States, and that's glyphosate. Glyphosate is the herbicide in the product Roundup, made by Monsanto. Glyphosate will cause neurologic disorders. It kills brain cells. Glyphosate also will bond to heavy metals in your system and move them around in your system, depositing them wherever it goes.
Glyphosate is a very, very small molecule and can pass the blood/brain barrier. So if it passes the blood/brain barrier, while it's carrying aluminum and fluoride at the same time, it takes those neuro toxins right into the brain, deposits them, causes the death of the neurons. So you get brain damage from it. So glyphosate another contributing factor, and I believe that it plays a pretty big role in the explosion of cases of Alzheimer's that we're seeing today. We're seeing lots of people with Alzheimer's, and in younger and younger ages.
In the process of healing this condition, we got different things that work very, very well at both detoxifying the brain in the nervous system and introducing nutrition to the nervous system. There are herbs. One of the very best, and this might come to surprise to many, is green coffee bean extract. The chemical ghlorogenic acid that occurs in green coffee beans is excellent for both protecting brain cells from the depositing of this amyloid protein, number one. Number two, it acts as an anti-oxidant, protecting the brain cells, the neurons in the brain. It also helps with the third factor that we're going to talk about here with Alzheimer's and that is it improves insulin sensitivity. So it helps with the metabolization of sugar, and we'll get to that in just a minute. We also have Rhodiola. Rhodiola is the herb from Russia that is extremely beneficial for the brain, for memory, and for folks with Alzheimer's. Ashwagandha, an herb from India that also is excellent for the brain. Both of these, again, they're not only good for enhancing memory but they're good for protecting the brain. So if you were to start on these earlier on in life, they would be good preventives for Alzheimer's or for neurologic disorders. They're also very beneficial in the treatment of neurologic conditions including Alzheimer's.
Another herb, ginkgo biloba, very, very good. Ginkgo biloba is both an antioxidant and it helps the microvascular circulation in the brain. There's an old saying in medicine, it's a tenet of medicine, and that is that healing is proportionate to blood flow. Ginkgo biloba is one of those herbs, also Rhodiola falls in this category also, that increase microvascular circulation and that microvascular circulation improves the blood flow in the brain. So if we improve that blood flow, as the blood flows better, we get more nutrients flowing into the tissue and more toxins flowing out of the tissue. So it's just extremely important.
Let's talk real quick about sugar. Sugar, it's interesting the average person in the United States consumes almost a hundred pounds of sugar a year. That's astronomical. That's massive, massive amounts of calories in the form of sugar. Well, sugar is an essential nutrient. It's something our body does need. It doesn't need it in massive quantities, but it does need some of it. When we flood our system with sugar, it's very similar to flooding a car with fuel. Our system will spit and sputter like a car that's flooded "with fuel" will spit and sputter. So things don't operate as well.
Another thing that happens with excessive sugar intake is that our red blood cells start to crystallize. Not only do they not carry oxygen and nutrients very well then, but they crystallize with sugar crystals and they have like barbs on them or I see similar to prickers on a rose stem that are protruding from the red blood cell. And as those crystallized red blood cells flowed around through the system, they tear up the blood vessels. They cut and damage our blood vessels. Very, very, very damaging and this is why folks with diabetes have such poor circulation, is their blood vessels have been tore up by these crystallized red blood cells and they've got scarring in their blood vessels. And so the blood vessels don't expand and contract very well, therefore, circulation gets reduced.
We're filming in 2017, the projections are that by 2030, 50% of the US population will have type 2 diabetes. Now that being the case, type 2 diabetes is when the system has been flooded with sugar for so long, the cells no longer will accept sugar very well and they do that by way of shutting down the insulin receptor sites. So you get this keyhole where insulin fits into and what happens is when the cells have been so saturated with sugar, they close down the keyhole and so the key doesn't fit into it anymore and you get what we call insulin resistance. So insulin resistance, if that happens in your brain, protein starts getting deposited in the brain, these amyloid proteins that disrupt our recall ability and disrupt our memory, and you end up with a condition very similar to Alzheimer's.
Some people call Alzheimer's type 3 diabetes. Instead of type 2 or type 1, they call it type 3 diabetes, and it's insulin resistance of the brain. And that's because the brain cells have been just chock-full of sugar for so long, they don't want anymore. Then they lock the door by shutting down the keyhole so the key can't fit in the hole anymore, the key being insulin, and so we become insulin resistant. That's a very bad thing because the only food source, the only fuel source for our brain is sugar. So if we don't have enough sugar getting into the brain, the brain doesn't work well. Well, if it doesn't work well, think of all the different things ... That only affects everything that the brain affects. You think of what doesn't your brain affect. Your brain's your body's control center, so it affects everything.