More at http://www.webmd.com/alzheimers/new...heimers-disease ... the full article is 3 pages long.

I wish they'd tried one factor at a time (fat/sugar) - instead of both and none

Exactly.


How about trying a high fat, low carbohydrate diet instead? They are blaming the fat instead of the sugar.

Too many confounding variables for me to even worry about this report.

1. I'm not a fan of basing diets on the glycemic index/load
2. I've been reading a lot about the bad things PUFAs do to the body, so if they were using a PUFA-based diet it would fail by default...
3. They are guilty of bad science.

I think the most frustrating thing from this is that the reason they did not use a high fat/low carbohydrate option,is because they consider the elimination of a food group(Grains,legumes)to be unhealthy..
They do not even consider a Paleo/Atkins approach to this research as they are so confidant those WOE are unmanageable and not worthy of study..To me the research community is still in the 1950's when it comes to the study and application of diet..It is as if you could take the Queen Mary back in time to the 1300's and say to them.."Here is a ship that will sail you safely around the world!" and they will reply.."You idiot! The world is flat!! Don't you know that?? Your ship is worthless to us,we are busy trying to measure the amount of water that falls off the edge of the world each year!!!!

I was writing a lengthy post about stuff but then I decided to agree with the other posters who pointed out that they should have just compared a low carb diet as well. The cynic in me thinks that they probably did but they didn't see anything positive that could ever come out of such findings.

and we all know which WOE does that best, don't we, class?

Am I reading this right? Are they saying that levels of beta-amyloid in spinal fluid actually went up on low fat, but stayed the same on high fat, in the people who should be most concerned about this stuff in the first place?

I think it was in Dr McCleary's Brain Trust Program that I read that insulin-degrading protein is also responsible for degrading amyloid plaque, the two compete for the ide. Healthy people might eat a higher carb diet, more insulin degrading protein is produced, and amyloid protein is disassembled--more insulin, more insulin/amyloid-degrading protein. Make sense? So, lower spinal fluid levels of amyloid protein on the higher carb, lower fat diet. Insulin levels weren't higher on the lower fat diet in healthy people, at least systemically. But I wonder what brain insulin levels were like?





The "healthy" people had increased levels of apolipoprotein E, supposed to be protective against amyloid plaque formation, in response to the high carb, low fat diet.

Healthy people ate high carb--and their bodies put out more of a substance that might protect them from alzheimer's. Is this a defensive response to a higher carb diet? Perhaps when things are working right, there's a little hormesis going on here; when do you put up a defense? When you're under assault. It's possible the sicker people didn't put up as good a defense; so no hormesis for them. For them, low fat just increases levels of amyloid, and perhaps, risk of alzheimer's.

What a stupid study, I thought scientists were meant to try and cut out the variables but they've mixed too many things together to test.