The Surprising Link Between Type 2 Diabetes & Alzheimer's

Today’s almonds have been activated by:

⏰ IN A RUSH?

Today’s 30-Second Summary

If you don’t have time to read the whole email today, here are some key takeaways:

• We don’t yet know for sure what causes Alzheimer’s disease, but we (as in, general scientific consensus) have a lot of hypotheses, and are aware of a lot of correlated factors.

• Risk factors for Alzheimer’s include a genetic predisposition, and, largely ignored especially in popular science, a significant overlap with type 2 diabetes.

  • Today’s featured expert, biomedical scientist Dr. Rhonda Patrick, looks at five ways we can reduce our risks for both of these, and some are less obvious than others:

    • Mediterranean diet

    • Regular moderate exercise

    • Intermittent fasting

    • Metformin usage

    • Sauna usage

• On which note, it’s vitally important to keep our brains sharp as we age

  • Today’s sponsor, Brilliant, are offering 10almonds subscribers 30 days free use of their habit-building daily learning app AND 20% off if you choose an annual subscription

Read on to learn about these things and more…

👀 WATCH AND LEARN

Three quick-and-easy tasty healthy breakfasts

Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!

Tasty breakfast menu items (and text versions of recipes!)

• 0:29 Chickpea frittata

  • https://bit.ly/chickpea_frittata 

• 2:51 Chocolate kasha porridge

  • https://bit.ly/choco_buckwheat_porridge 

• 5:07 Ricotta toast

  • https://bit.ly/ricotta_toast 

• 6:51 Bloopers!

🔬 MAIN FEATURE

The Surprising Link Between Type 2 Diabetes & Alzheimer's

This is Dr. Rhonda Patrick. She’s a biomedical scientist with expertise in the areas of aging, cancer, and nutrition. In the past five years she has expanded her research of aging to focus more on Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, as she has a genetic predisposition to both.

What does that genetic predisposition look like? People who (like her) have the APOE-ε4 allele have a twofold increased risk of Alzheimer’s disease—and if you have two copies (i.e., one from each of two parents), the risk can be up to tenfold. Globally, 13.7% of people have at least one copy of this allele.

So while getting Alzheimer’s or not is not, per se, hereditary… The predisposition to it can be passed on.

What’s on her mind?

Dr. Patrick has noted that, while we don’t know for sure the causes of Alzheimer’s disease, and can make educated guesses only from correlations, the majority of current science seems to be focusing on just one: amyloid plaques in the brain.

This is a worthy area of research, but ignores the fact that there are many potential Alzheimer’s disease mechanisms to explore, including (to count only mainstream scientific ideas):

• The amyloid hypothesis

• The tau hypothesis

• The inflammatory hypothesis

• The cholinergic hypothesis

• The cholesterol hypothesis

• The Reelin hypothesis

• The large gene instability hypothesis

…as well as other strongly correlated factors such as glucose hypometabolism, insulin signalling, and oxidative stress.

If you lost your keys and were looking for them, and knew at least half a dozen places they might be, how often would you check the same place without paying any attention to the others?

To this end, she notes about those latter-mentioned correlated factors:

There’s another “smoking gun” for this too, because dysfunction in the blood vessels and capillaries that line the blood-brain barrier seem to be a very early event that is common between all types of dementia (including Alzheimer’s) and between type 2 diabetes and APOE-ε4.

Research is ongoing, and Dr. Patrick is at the forefront of that. However, there’s a practical take-away here meanwhile…

What can we do about it?

Dr. Patrick hypothesizes that if we can reduce the risk of type 2 diabetes, we may reduce the risk of Alzheimer’s with it.

Obviously, avoiding diabetes if possible is a good thing to do anyway, but if we’re aware of an added risk factor for Alzheimer’s, it becomes yet more important.

Of course, all the usual advices apply here, including a Mediterranean diet and regular moderate exercise.

Three other things Dr. Patrick specifically recommends (to reduce both type 2 diabetes risk and to reduce Alzheimer’s risk) include:

• Practice intermittent fasting

• Consider taking metformin

• Enjoy using a sauna

(links are to her blog, with lots of relevant science for each)

You can also hear more from Dr. Patrick personally, as a guest on Dr. Peter Attia’s podcast recently. She discusses these topics in much greater detail than we have room for in our newsletter:

Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!

❤️ OUR SPONSORS MAKE THIS PUBLICATION POSSIBLE

Sharpen your math, data, and CS skills

Whether you’re a professional getting an edge in your career or a lifelong learner sharpening your skills, Brilliant is a top-tier way to level up in minutes a day.

Brilliant has thousands of quick, visual, interactive lessons that get you hands-on with cutting-edge topics—from foundational math to AI, data science, neural networks, and more.

But Brilliant isn’t just a more fun way to learn—it’s also more effective. In fact, interactive learning has been shown to be 6x more effective than watching lecture videos.

Click here to check out Brilliant, and start building skills in minutes a day!

You can try everything Brilliant has to offer with a 30-day free trial.

PS: right now you can get an exclusive 20% off an annual premium subscription!

Please do visit our sponsors—they help keep 10almonds free

🌍 AROUND THE WEB

What’s happening in the health world…

• Western science catches up with First Nations' medicinal use of ant honey

• Activewear angst: why shopping for workout clothes can be harmful to women

• Newfound antibodies neutralize all COVID variants, other viruses

• Women increasingly dying of alcohol-related causes

• Researchers use the antidepressant tianeptine to manage chronic pain

• People with increased genetic risk of Alzheimer's may lose sense of smell first

• Is venting good for your health?

More to come tomorrow!

📖 ONE-MINUTE BOOK REVIEW

The Comfort Zone: Create a Life You Really Love with Less Stress and More Flow – by Kristen Butler

Are you sitting comfortably? Then we'll begin. Funny, how being comfortable can be a good starting point, then we are advised "You have to get out of your comfort zone".

And yet, when we think of our personal greatest moments in life, they were rarely uncomfortable moments. Why is that?

Kristen Butler wants us to resolve this paradox, with a reframe:

The comfort zone? That's actually the "flow" zone.

Just as "slow and steady wins the race", we can—like the proverbial tortoise—take our comfort with us as we go.

The discomfort zone? That's the stress zone, the survival zone, the "putting out fires" zone. From the outside, it looks like we're making a Herculean effort, and perhaps we are, but is it actually so much better than peaceful consistent productivity?

Butler writes in a way that will be relatable for many, and may be a welcome life-ring if you feel like you've been playing catch-up for a while.

Is she advocating for complacency, then? No, and she discusses this too. That "complacency zone" is really the "burnout zone" after being in the "survival zone" for too long.

She lays out for us, therefore, a guide for growing in comfort, expanding the comfort zone yes, but by securely pushing it from the inside, not by making a mad dash out and hoping it follows us.

Bottom line: if you've been (perhaps quietly) uncomfortable for a little too long for comfort, this book can reframe your approach to get you to a position of sustainable, stress-free growth.

Click here to check out The Comfort Zone, and start building yours!

Wishing you a wonderful month ahead,

The 10almonds Team