Alzheimer's Has a New Name. And It Should Concern You

This one is personal. My mum developed Alzheimer's. My dad developed type 2 diabetes. Two different diagnoses. Same root cause. They ate the same meals at the same table for nearly seventy years.

Your brain is the most energy-hungry organ in your body. It makes up roughly two per cent of your body weight but consumes around twenty per cent of your energy. And it depends on insulin to help glucose get into its cells.

When you have been running chronically elevated insulin for decades, the brain's cells can become insulin resistant, just like your muscles and liver. The result is devastating. The brain can be swimming in glucose, plenty of sugar circulating around the neurons, but the neurons cannot access it.

Imagine standing in front of a locked pantry, starving, while you can see the shelves full of food through the glass door. That is what happens to neurons in an Alzheimer's brain. They are energy-starved in the midst of plenty.

Insulin resistance multiplies the risk of Alzheimer's by five times. Not five per cent. Five times. And research suggests that even if you carry the APOE4 gene that increases risk, the metabolic environment determines whether that gene expresses itself as disease.

But there is hope. The brain can run on ketones instead of glucose. Ketones bypass the broken insulin transporters entirely. Some of the most promising research into early-stage Alzheimer's involves ketogenic diets and intermittent fasting, giving the brain a fuel it can actually use.