The KETO Diet’s Effect on Dementia

The KETO Diet has become very popular. It’s where you’re eating mostly fats. Some recent research looked at how it impacts a person’s brain.

Your brain runs on sugar. When you get older, the brain can struggle to metabolize the sugar properly which can lead to cognitive decline. By fasting for 12 hours you shift your body towards producing ketones which the brain prefers.

Ketones can supply more than 60% of your brain’s energy. In this study, the researchers gave 19 people, who averaged 75 years old and had cognitive impairment, 2 drinks per day that contained what’s called a medium-chain triglycerides (MCT) like coconut oil. The body converted the MCTs into ketones.

After six months, the researchers found significant improvements in the subject’s language skills, processing speed, executive function and they even scored 54% higher on a test of visual memory.

So…if you or someone you now who is aging and having memory problems, is slowing down or struggling to find words, then ketones might be the way to go for the person.

Follow Up on Drinking More Whole Milk

Last week in the Teplitz Blurb, I wrote about it now being okay to have more whole milk in your diet as it has beneficial impacts. There were a couple of caveats that I should have pointed out.

1. The way regular dairy cows are raised today you can have issues with antibiotics being given to them as well as them not being pasture raised.

2. Many people are allergic to cow’s milk and some question whether we should be drinking cow’s milk past childhood.

3.  If you are going to drink whole milk, see if you can get organic and if your state allows it, get raw milk. In Virginia, my wife, Elizabeth, and I own a share of a cow, which is legal to do so we get to have raw milk. 

4. Yogurt and Keifer that have live bacteria in them is more beneficial to the body than drinking just milk.

5. There are other options to getting fats in your diet besides drinking milk. Nuts, seeds, avocados, chia seeds and fatty fish are all good choices. So are oils, such as, extra virgin olive oil and coconut oil.

Basically, you have a number of options to look at when you decide to add more fat into your diet.