The Source of Dementia V7

V7: Dementia Recovery: Source of Dementia

Hello, and welcome to my video presentation. I am Dr. William Emmett Walsh, MD, board-certified allergist, immunologist, and author of How I Recovered From Dementia, my 7th book about our diet and the diseases it causes or worsens. In my videos, I have discussed how my diet, taught me by my patients, is an essential and powerful treatment in controlling diseases.

In my last video, video 6, I illustrated the deadly dangers of our modern diet by telling you a shocking story of the woman who recovered from a diet-caused coma and then died. In this video, I want to burrow a little deeper into what we know about diet-caused diseases, stressing their treatment and why their poisonous nature causes so many diseases that plague us. 

How can I convince you that you should be careful of what you eat? How do I tell you that this care is necessary to stop or reverse your diseases and preserve your health?

 Let me try by citing a hypothetical example. 

Please imagine that our diet causes disease, not because it contains too much of the aging chemicals, but because it has a poison such as cyanide or arsenic. I will arbitrarily pick arsenic. 

The arsenic will act much like drinking or eating more of the aging chemicals than we tolerate. Now think about adding arsenic, very dilute and only mildly harmful into your foods and beverages at every meal.

Now, this mildly poisonous arsenic will slowly, over weeks, months and years, penetrate every part of your body, damaging all parts of your body. It causes or worsens any diseases to which you are susceptible. To what diseases are you susceptible? The diseases to which your genetic blueprint makes you susceptible.

I have already mentioned some of these diseases. They include conditions affecting the heart, eye, hearing, intestines, skin, brain, any part of the body. They also include conditions like depression, autism and anxiety. Being weak against any of these diseases and conditions, you do not feel well. You can’t feel well while you eat poison daily, even if the poison is mild.

Now, let’s turn our attention to the brain. What would be the effect of this arsenic-containing, nerve-cell-killing diet in childhood or young adulthood? How about a decrease in IQ, resulting in a ‘B’ or ‘C’ instead of an ‘A’ in tests? You may think this lower test result is a minor problem, not worth getting excited about. However, if the child needs an ‘A’ to get into the advanced language or math group in grade school. Or it matters if the young adult needs ‘A’s to enroll in a prized high school, college or graduate school. Now, it is a big problem. These schools will not accept the child or young adult who then misses these opportunities because of their lower test results. 

Think that this is too far-fetched to be true? It is not. Studies show that avoiding the excess consumption of one of the aging chemicals, fructose, and somewhat decreasing another one, MSG, as the Mediterranean diet does, raises the IQ and improves school performance.

Just think of the improved grades from decreasing the excess intake of the other aging chemicals, citrus and galactose. Maybe these better marks are consistent ‘A’s, leading to an unlimited future.

Now, let’s go further in our thoughts. Accept the idea, that I believe is true, that the most delicate cell, the cell most susceptible to harm, is the immature or baby nerve cell that is not covered by its protective cloak, the myelin sheath. This sheath covers the nerve cell’s major communication with other nerves. This means of communication is a projection from the nerve cell body called the nerve axon. Further, accept my thought that the sheath protects the immature nerve cell only after the nerve becomes part of the brain. 

Before it can reach the brain, or as it reaches the brain, arsenic injures or destroys this baby nerve cell. This injured or dead cell cannot join the brain to refresh and renew it. Damage from our theoretical arsenic poison to these immature nerve cells in children and young adults must be the reason for their decreased IQ. Much like research shows that consuming excess aging chemicals causes the youths’ reduced IQ.

Now let’s shift our attention to the other side of the age scale, the adult. In the adult, the body defends the brain against poisons that reach the brain. This poison reaches the brain through the arteries that supply food and oxygen to the brain. This defense is not perfect. Many toxins are small, composed of just a few carbon atoms. Some of these poisons slip through this defense because of their small size, but it is a pretty good defense. It is called the blood brain barrier. 

Unfortunately, most adults have suffered a lifetime of head injury that injures the blood-brain barrier. These injuries arise from playing sports, from falling with a head injury, from silent virus brain infections, from immune reactions against brain tissue due to obesity and a sedentary lifestyle, and because their genes weaken the blood-brain barrier. These damaging chemicals, in our example arsenic, can now more easily reach the elderly brain by leaking through the damaged blood-brain barrier. 

The aging chemicals, or the arsenic in our example, damage the nerve cells in the aged brain. They also kill new baby nerve cells before they can reach and join the brain’s nerve cells. Losing these new nerve cells, the brains of older folks shrink, age, and function poorly. Eventually, they no longer keep the afflicted elder alive and death triumphantly marches in. We call this sequence of events the dementias.

How do we stop this dread march to death?

We cannot repair the blood-brain barrier. But, is there another way to stop this brain damage? Yes!!! First, understand that many studies show that the brain can repair itself. It will restore itself if you stop flooding it with the chemicals that age you and damage your nerve cells. Free of this excess, your brain gains the opportunity to return to the thinking, planning, and self-care that dementia steals away. 

When I mention the dementias, I include Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease as I have both of these dementias, and I understand that Lewy body dementia is related, especially to Parkinson’s. Those are three of the multitude of diseases caused by our diet and permitted by our genes. If you follow my diet and avoid excess amounts of the aging chemicals, you will gain a great chance to reverse dementia. Although other diets slow the march of dementia, only my diet stops it and allows the brain to heal itself.

I know my brain repaired itself when I followed my diet. I let it do its repair job and it did the job well. 

Recall that the Mediterranean avoids excess fructose and partially avoids MSG. The value of avoiding these chemicals is best understood by examining a John Hopkins article in John Hopkins Medicine, titled “Take Your Diet to the Mediterranean,”. The article looks at the value of the Mediterranean diet’s avoidance of fructose and MSG in heart disease.  https://tinyurl.com/wbwhwe4. 

The diet helps the heart by:

Helping keep cholesterol healthy.

Helping the body absorb blood sugar (diabetes).

Cooling inflammation in the obese and sedentary.

Keeping arteries flexible and resisting artery plaques, strokes and heart attacks.

Avoiding excess aging chemicals is a powerful treatment. 

I hope I have helped you understand that the excessive amounts of aging chemicals in our diet act like sub-lethal doses of arsenic. Like arsenic, they age you, poison you and make you suffer many common diseases. Whereas other diets fail, my diet can reverse many of these unfortunate consequences.

Thank you for coming to my video and I look forward to seeing you at my next video. Like my “shocking video”, it should surprise you. I do not know if I would believe what I will tell you in this video if it had not happened to me.