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That killed a sacred cow: Eating red meat might help some people avoid Alzheimers

Image by Zdenek Vadura from Pixabay

By Jo Nova

This study kills a few sacred cows at once: it pokes a hole in the idea that less red meat is always better, and that one diet is “the best” for everyone.

Researchers in Sweden followed 2000 people for 15 years, and expected to find that the people with the high risk ApoE4 gene, ate more red meat they would suffer from an increase in dementia. Instead the study showed the opposite. People with the ApoE4 gene who had lower intakes of red meat, had “more than twice” the risk of Alzheimers. But the ApoE4 people with the highest consumption of meat had the same risk as people without the risky gene.

There’s a dark possibility that all those years of Vegan Wokery pushing people to eat less red meat to “save the planet” may have come at the price of an increase in Alzheimers.

ApoE4 is a very unusual variant, it’s both common and yet important — about 30% of the Swedish population have one or two copies of ApoE4, which puts them at significantly greater risk of Alzheimers. Even one copy of the variant increases the risk […]

March 24th, 2026 | Tags: , , | Category: Global Warming, Health | Print This Post Print This Post | |

Is lithium the missing essential nutrient for brains that could prevent Alzheimers?

Top row: In a mouse model of Alzheimer’s disease, lithium deficiency (right) dramatically increased amyloid beta deposits in the brain compared with mice that had normal physiological levels of lithium (left). Bottom row: The same was true for the Alzheimer’s neurofibrillary tangle protein tau. Images: Yankner Lab

By Jo Nova

Lithia Springs 1888 poster

A bit of a blockbuster… Wow. A major new study this month suggests for the first time, finally, what might be a causal link between a deficiency in lithium and Alzheimer’s. The team at Harvard asks: Could Lithium Explain — and Treat — Alzheimer’s Disease?

A few weeks ago, they released a big paper in Nature. They had analyzed brain tissue from people who had died, and found that lithium levels declined dramatically in people with mild cognitive decline, in other words, in the earliest stages, before Alzheimer’s was diagnosed. When they deprived mice of lithium, the mice showed accelerated brain pathology and their memory declined. But when they fed deprived mice lithium, they were able to restore their memory. It’s quite remarkable. There is hope.

We’ve known for years lithium might be essential

For a century or more there have […]

August 28th, 2025 | Tags: , , , , , | Category: Diet, Health, Vitamins | Print This Post Print This Post | |

One in six dementia cases might be avoided with Vitamin D

Click to enlarge | Paper

Just imagine that 17% of dementia cases could be prevented with a new drug that cost five cents, had a huge safety margin, and virtually no risk?

The study from the University of South Australia looked at data from 294,000 people in their 60s in the UK, and followed them for a median of 11 years or so. Researchers even controlled for time spent outdoors, types of physical activity, and the amount of oily fish they ate to try to cover for other benefits from these activities.

Seems to me, that if Ministers of Health were interested in actual health, they might be offering free Vitamin D tests, free supplement bottles, lessons in school and public awareness programs. They might even offer testing clinics in shopping centre car parks or free bottles at the RSL and Bowls clubs. Crazy idea right? In the world you thought you were living in, the treasurer might be chasing them down to forecast savings on public health spending ten years from now by keeping 1 in 6 out of nursing homes. Instead our Departments of Health are apparently keen to approve patented drugs with few clinical benefits […]

June 15th, 2022 | Tags: , , , | Category: Health, Vitamins | Print This Post Print This Post | |