Build Health: Want To Prevent Alzheimer's?

Copyright 2004 William R. Quesnell

For one option to prevent Alzheimer's, the progressive memory loss and mental deterioration associated with brain damage, you can try this:

Place blind faith in the conventional research establishment, an outfit that for 40 years has been hot on the trail of a cure for cancer, but has come up empty. Here's their present focus:

Because the heavy metal aluminum has been implicated as a possible causal factor in a number of diseases, medical scientists have targeted it as the cause of Alzheimer's disease.

Experts recommend we avoid aluminum. But we can't.

To avoid aluminum we must forego all fruits, nuts, grains, and vegetables--even natural water itself--as they contain large amounts of aluminum.

But recent research, reported in the Journal of Inorganic Biochemistry, suggests a possible way to protect brain cells against aluminum.

Monkeying with rabbits, medical scientists injected an aluminum compound into the brain fluids of the bunnies. The aluminum compound, as theorized, wreaked havoc with the rabbits' neurons.

However, when the researchers dosed the rabbits with lithium, a favorite treatment for schizophrenia, it prevented neuronal death from exposure to the aluminum compound.

As Alzheimer's usually kicks in during middle age, presumably our medical scientists will design a protocol for you to take lithium injections well before middle age, and lasting until the end of your life. That would, if you were equivalent to a rabbit, counteract your continual uptake of aluminum from food.

However, should you decide to get serious about preventing Alzheimer's, and know full well that rabbits are not humans, you can follow a much wiser approach:

Take a look at the differences between the people of the past who did not get Alzheimer's, and those of today who fall prey to this disease.

People of the past also consumed food containing aluminum, but did not suffer from Alzheimer's. Why?

The plants they ate and the flesh they ate of the animals raised on those plants, contained the entire mineral team, because the soils of that time contained the entire mineral team.

When food sources contain a full complement of minerals, we ingest all of them, but our uptake of toxic minerals like aluminum and cadmium turns out to be little or none.

Conversely, when food sources are grown on minerally impoverished soils, our food takes up large amounts of toxic

minerals that we ingest and retain, instead of excreting them.

The folks of the past did not consume food, grown upon mineral deficient or unbalanced soils, that bedeviled them with high amounts of toxic minerals such as aluminum. Additionally, as acid rain and the use of artificial fertilizers were negligible, aluminum normally locked in soils and rock was not liberated into their food.

The soils of yesteryear were dense with macro-minerals like calcium and magnesium, as well as dozens of micro-minerals bearing familiar names like boron and zinc, and unfamiliar names like cesium and gallium.

Sufficient intake of all these minerals stops aluminum from accumulating in the brain and leads to its excretion.

The primary difference between those who did not get sick and die like we do, and those who become victims of Alzheimer's, turns out to be nutritional status.

The Alzheimer's victim-in-process has an inadequate intake of nutrients and/or excessive intake of nutrient-poor foods. Conversely, his/her healthy ancestors had a nutrient-dense diet.

Here is the other difference for Alzheimer's candidates:

Our healthy ancestors had little exposure to toxins, from food and environment, that increase nutritional requirements from the physiologic stresses they, the toxins, place on the body.

You and I have a heavy exposure to a wide range of toxins that increase our nutritional requirements in order for us to successfully deal with all these poisons.

When we match the nutrient-dense diet of the past, and minimize our exposure to toxins of the present, we insure that aluminum and other heavy metals do not enter the body in sufficient quantities to wreak havoc with the metabolic enzyme systems operating in our brain and elsewhere.

The nutrient-dense diet of the past contained, minimally, four times the amount of minerals, and ten times the amount of fat- soluble vitamins found in the American diet of the late 1930's and early 1940's. And the nutrient density of the American diet continues to decline.

People who learn where health comes from and practice prevention won't become victims of Alzheimer's, and will not need the medical community practicing on them with lithium or any other magic bullet.

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