The road to Alzheimer’s disease is lined with processed foods

https://qz.com/1234901/the-road-to-alzheimers-disease-is-lined-with-processed-foods/

Written by Dr. Lisa Mosconi
Mar. 23, 2018

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By 2050, we are on track to have almost 15 million Alzheimer’s patients in the US alone. That’s roughly the population of NYC, Los Angeles, and Chicago combined. Now add a few more cities to take care of them.

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In a large-scale study, researchers found that a 10% increase in consumption of ultra-processed foods led to a 12% increase in overall cancer

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At the Alzheimer’s Prevention Clinic at Weill Cornell Medical, this latest cancer research had our full attention. The findings line up so closely with research in the field, including our own work, linking diet and risk of Alzheimer’s—and underscore how important lifestyle changes can be to delaying or even avoiding the onset of the disease.

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For Alzheimer’s, as with cancer—but also as with other conditions like heart disease and diabetes—much of the risk is related to behavioral and lifestyle factors. The consensus among scientists is that over one third of all Alzheimer’s cases could be prevented by improving our lifestyle. This includes ameliorating cardiovascular fitness, keeping our brains intellectually stimulated, and perhaps most of all: eating better.

“Eating better” means addressing the American ultra-processed diet. Ultra-processed is a technical term, and exists in a spectrum of food processing. An apple straight from the tree is wholly unprocessed. Dry the apple, and store it away with common preservatives like sulphur dioxide, and it becomes a processed food.

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But ultra-processed foods are the extreme in the scale, and by some measures account for half of the American diet. These include mass produced, packaged foods, as well as foods containing manufactured substances like hydrogenated oils (aka trans-fats), modified starches, and protein isolates. In plain English, this means commercial breads and buns; packaged snacks; industrialized confectionery and desserts; sodas and sweetened drinks; meat products like cold cuts and chicken nuggets; instant noodles and soups; frozen or shelf stable ready meals; margarine, processed cheese, and most creamers.

These are the foods whose consumption triggered an increase in cancer cases in the BMJ study. And these are the foods whose consumption increases your risk of cognitive decline and dementia too. While some argue that “organic” processed food may be less harmful than non-organic processed food, it is still processed food and as such, should be minimized.

In epidemiological studies, people who consumed as little as two grams a day of trans-fats had twice the risk of those who ate less than two grams. Alarmingly, most people in those studies ate at least two grams a day, with the majority of participants eating more than double that dose on a regular basis.

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But it’s very good news, in terms of our individual and collective abilities to reduce those numbers drastically.

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