Alzheimer’s Disease Prevention
The best way to get rid of Alzheimer's is to not develop it in the first place. There are four main ways to prevent Alzheimer's disease: diet, stress management, exercise, and spiritual fitness. In this note, I want to do a general overview of ways you can approach mitigating your risk for Alzheimer's and overall living a healthier life. In the future, I plan on diving deeper into each of these subtopics and giving you a roadmap to easing yourself into a healthier lifestyle. (subtopics drawn from ARPF website).
(1) Diet:
Diet plays a huge role in mitigating some of the 10 biggest risk factors for Alzheimer's that I laid out yesterday (link). A proper diet greatly reduces risk for T2D, Obesity, Vascular Insufficiency, and Oxidative Stress. It also plays a noticeable role in things like neuroinflammation and mitochondrial impairment. While I plan to look into more nuanced micronutrient profiles and how they each individually impact certain risk for Alzheimer's Disease in the future, for now, as a general trend, you want to have most of your diet consist of proteins and carbohydrates while limiting fat intake. There's no hard fast rules that I can give you on exact macronutrient profiles, but if we breakdown the carbs/proteins/fats, you may get a better idea of what each meal should look like. For carbohydrates, you should prioritize complex carbs like whole grains, fruits, vegetables, legumes, etc. instead of processed carbs and things of that nature. For proteins, we're looking at lean proteins like fish or chicken or legumes, especially fish that are high in Omega-3s. Finally, for fats, we want to prioritize sources made up of unsaturated fats like olive oil, nuts, avocados, etc. This also means limiting things that are high in saturated fats like processed meats, butter, and cheese. For now, if you are curious in existing diets that follow these guidelines, a good place to look would be the Mediterranean Diet and the MIND (Mediterranean-DASH Intervention for Neurodegenerative Delay) Diet.
(2) Stress Management:
Out of the factors previously addressed, levels of stress heavily impacts neuroinflammation, vascular insufficiencies, T2D, obesity, mitochondrial impairments, and oxidative stress. For most of us, stress can be managed by exercising regularly, sleeping eight hours, and engaging in social connection. In the future, I'll go more into depth on how stress impacts these factors, as well as more nuanced approaches to stress management, but for now, trying to practice a healthy mindset and working towards the benchmarks of exercise, sleep, and socialization will take you so so far.
(3) Exercise:
Exercise has a very broad impact on the mitigation of risk for Alzheimer's by reducing neuroinflammation, vascular insufficiency, T2D, obesity, mitochondrial impairment, and oxidative stress. The number of minutes we are aiming for here is 150 minutes every week. That's just 22 minutes everyday OR 30 minutes on the weekdays. This, of course, can be worked up to. If you aren't active at all, just start with a walk (untimed), every other day. Once you feel comfortable with that, you can move up to going on a walk every day, and then progress to other forms of exercise. REMEMBER, everything starts small. As they say, Rome wasn't built in a day.
(4) Spiritual Fitness:
Spiritual Fitness is the practice of socializing, temperance, compassion, and spirituality. Practicing spiritual fitness is essentially another form of stress management, so many of the same impacted factors apply here. For this section, starting small looks like reaching out to family, going to church, meditating, etc. Like the other three sections, I plan to go into much more detail in the future on this topic, but this note is meant more as an overview.
Thanks for reading this brief overview on the main lifestyle changes you can make to mitigate your risk for Alzheimer's Disease and cognitive decline. I'm excited to share my journey with you all, and this is only the beginning! Stay tuned for more in depth notes (with citations) in the future on the topics introduced above.
Best,
John Chaney
