Insulin and Alzheimers Disease

At Real Life Medicine, we love, love, love talking about insulin. The two things that we love talking about, insulin and how to lower it so you can burn your own fat. Then the second thing is mindset. Mindset is not just willpower. Mindset is about managing your thoughts so that you can actually do what you know you need to do. So it's a two-pronged approach. 

Some of previous blog posts about insulin include:

• Some of the conditions high insulin causes and how it relates to blood pressure
• How you can test your insulin
• How to lower insulin and that the key, the absolute key to lowering your insulin, is to eat low carb, real food. LCRF is our acronym

Now let’s talk about Alzheimer's disease. I put a link on our FB page to an article posted by the Metabolic Health Summit, which actually explains beautifully how insulin is related to Alzheimer's disease.

Alzheimer's is a disease of the brain and it's due to an excess of these proteinaceous plaques building up in the brain and therefore stopping the connections, because as you know, thoughts are just connections between two nerve cells. So if you've got a big fat plaque blocking that connection then that nerve cell, that thought, is gone, which unfortunately impacts memory and working memory for these people.

So the basic gist of this article is that when we produce insulin, like everything, we also break it down. So we make and break. There's an enzyme that breaks down insulin. It's also the same enzyme that breaks down plaques that are forming in the brain. So these little plaques forming in the brain can be broken down. However, the same enzyme is breaking down insulin and breaking down the plaque. The problem is so they're competing. And the thing is, insulin is the king of the world. It wins. If enzymes could talk (which I know they can’t) the enzyme says, "Right, I've got to get rid of all this insulin first and then I’ll deal with the plaque in the brain." So it does all that. And then it runs out for the plaque. So the plaque just gets to build up. That's the summary in a very layman's term.

So one of the things, if you can keep your insulin low, then there is enough enzyme to go and break down the plaque, and that's wonderful. So there's a whole host of things being coined now. There is a wonderful term that I quite like called type three diabetes. Now it's not super popular within the medical community yet. If you went to your GP and said, "I think I've got type three diabetes." They would think that you were a tiny bit nuts. But you and I know that what we're talking about really is just an excess of insulin.

So, you know the way to lower your insulin there are three ways.

1. Low carb, real food. That's the number one. I should probably say that's number one, two and three, but it's not. Number one, low carb, real food. 
2. Number two, fasting!  Fasting is a very powerful way to lower insulin. It's very hard to do if you're not doing low carb, because you run out of fuel, that's a whole story.
3. Number three, medication for some people, Metformin is the main one really It's the first line for people that really need to lower their insulin. And we use that in all sorts of things, certainly type two diabetes, polycystic ovarian syndrome, things where we want to lower insulin. Now you can do it with low carb, real food and no medication. Absolutely, you can. I've seen people with crazy, crazy high insulin who lower it by doing low carb, real food.

And you can lower insulin at any age. I've got people in their seventies who have come to see me. I check their insulin and their insulin is crazy high. They go onto a low carb, real food approach. Insulin has dropped. Two people I can think of off the top of my head, and there's more. One guy's lost 50 kilos. Another lady I know has lost 75 kilos. 

And this is without surgery, without a sleeve, without bariatrics. This is just doing their low carb, real food approach. Interestingly, neither of these two needed Metformin.  So you can do it without it, but sometimes it's necessary.  We don't need to demonise our tools. That's all they are. They're our tools to help us.

Keep well and keep your insulin low.

Take care wonderful humans

Lucy and Mary

Dr Lucy Burns and Dr Mary Barson