Genetic or Environmental: how to find out and what to do

So if there's a possibility you really have Alzheimer's...

Why? How did you get it? Does it run in the family? Did you do something wrong, eat the wrong thing, spray too much insecticide in your back yard?

A laboratory in Massachusetts, Athena Labs, is one of the few places that will actually run a genetic blood test to see if you are genetically predisposed to getting Alzheimer's. It's called the APOe test, and checks for some specific chromosomes dealing with not only your likeliness to contract the disease, but also your genetic ability to fight it.

It's a blood test worth getting if you have any question. Either way, it will give you an answer that will either allay your fears or give you a heads up to begin fighting it with some urgency.

In our case, as it turns out, my wife had the best genetic results we could hope for. Not only is she NOT predisposed to getting it, she also has the best combination to fight it... So our next question was, why did she get it?

If it's not genetic, then it must be environmental.

So I began diligently scouring the web for answers... and found that the first skill I needed to develop is sifting the legitimate doctors from the snake oil salesmen an the old, outdated, information from the new.

Believe me, there are a ton of snake oil sales solutions to Alzheimer's, and any other ailment you might have. To make matters more interesting, there can be some significant truths in what you will learn from reading the snake oil sales pitches... I mean to say, there are always some significant truths built into any good lie. When you're reading these pitches, they've got to get you thinking 'yeah! I believe that!' to several points before they sneak in the twisted or false statements, and frankly, many times the writers don't believe they are sending you down the guilded path at all... they actually believe it themselves. So, the only real solution is to learn how to separate the wheat from the chaff, so to speak. I can't tell you how to do that, I just can (most of the time) and I think it just comes from life experience and reading a "whole bunch" of both truth and fiction.

Here are some clues: If just one product from one source will save your life and you can get rich selling it... If you can find no corroborating information from other sources or find it difficult to validate specific case studies cited... If there seems to be only one medical guru in the world who knows the secret... well, you catch my drift.

Here's what I've learned:

The primary environmental causes of Alzheimer's, as determined by autopsy of people who died from complications of Alzheimer's (I don't think anyone actually ever dies of Alzheimer's itself) are:

Heavy Metals:

1. Mercury
2. Lead
3. Aluminum

Poisons:

1. Arsenic
2. Pesticides

Foods:

1. Additives
2. Trans-fats
3. Artificial Sweeteners
4. Preservatives

Any of these can be significant contributors to the onset of Alzheimer's and many can be avoided, some can be reversed and none are actually proven to be THE central cause.

Let's take heavy metals, for example:

Mercury: Well, canned tuna is a prime source. So if you lived on a diet of significant amounts of fish, most notably canned tuna for some period of your life, maybe mercury is the culprit. As a kid, did you ever play with a silvery slimy ball of mercury from a broken thermometer? Maybe that's were the level of exposure came from. One of the most innocuous sources is those silver colored fillings in your teeth... what the dentists call Amalgam fillings. There's a significant amount of mercury in those fillings.

Lead: Did you grow up in an old house and eat paint chips off a hand-me-down crib or off the porch rails. Did you chew pencils in school (even the paint on the outside may have contained lead to make the paint shiny). Did you handle a lot of fishing tackle with lead weights? Chew wooden or metal toys with shiny paint?

Aluminum: Did you cook with aluminum cookware? Teflon covered aluminum frypans where the teflon had been scratched through to the aluminum? What about soda or beer in aluminum cans? Foods stored or re-cooked in aluminum foil?

OK... some sources will tell you that you are chicken little running around saying the sky is falling if you jump on the heavy metal bandwagon. Still, we were not about to take any chances.

1: We removed my wife's Amalgam fillings and had them replaced with composite fillings.

2: We found a method to detox the body of heavy metal poisoning... which *could be* snake oil medicine, but we had it from multiple sources that taking a high dosage of chlorophyll was a natural solution to help the body reduce or eliminate stored amounts of heavy metals, most notably mercury, and that chlorella (available in any health food store) was the most effective treatment, so we went through several weeks of taking the highest recommended dosage of these little green pills. The only negative side effect of which was (as it said on the bottle) that it makes you a bit *windy*. An understatement in our experience.

Poisons:

We couldn't find any Arsenic in our garage or under our sinks, or any use of pesticides that would have been significant enough for us to focus on poisons, though we stopped doing ANY of the spraying of insecticides ourselves. I even checked city tap water records for Arsenic in the cities where my wife had lived and, for the years where they measured it, it was virtually non-existent.

Also, if farmers in the heartland of America who spray insecticides on acres and acres of crops are not a significant pool of people with Alzheimer's, it does not seem that spraying a few rose bushes could really be the culprit.

Foods:

Here we have to do some serious evaluation of our eating habits.

My wife was a big fan of anything that said "Low Fat" or "Fat Free" on it for years. Little did we realize that most of the food items with those words meant that some man-made chemical concoction was used to make the phony food taste like real food. This was often a chemical soup of trans-fats, artificial sweetners and preservatives.

When you realize that most of these food additives, preservatives and artificial sweeteners have only been in use in the last 30 or 40 years and that the rates of people with some debilitating diseases have increased significantly over the last 30 to 40 years, it's hard not to lean towards a conclusion that there may be some correlation.

There's a good possibility that we have replaced so many natural ingredients in our foods with synthetic ingredients that we have actually become malnourished in specific nutrients that used to be in our diets but that we have engineered out.

Even so-called *vitamins* and *multi-vitamins* are often synthesized chemical concoctions that may bear little resemblance to their natural counterparts. So even though we feed our kids formula and cartoon character chewables, they could be starving for vitamins and minerals that would have been in a natural diet and short-changed the development of natural balance or immune systems that would stop the development of diseases like diabetes, autism, multiple-sclerosis and Alzheimer's.

Maybe we've been doing that long enough that the occurrance of early onset Alzheimer's for baby boomers is at an astounding high.

I began carefully evaluating foods we were consuming. Looking at labels, and looking for *natural* food supplement choices... Trying at nearly all costs to avoid a chemical diet and embrace a *natural* diet.

Such a proliferation of non-natural foods exists that whole store chains have sprouted that claim only to sell natural foods, or have mostly all natural foods. (You've got to read the labels everywhere).

We still eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. But the bread is multi-grain, the jelly (or jam) is Smucker's Simply Fruit, and the peanut butter is Laura Scudder's Natural (so what if I have to stir it the first time we open the jar?).

We're careful to use real butter, or butter substitutes with natural oils and flavors. We have nearly eliminated all diet soda and stick with water or Tropicana Fruit Juice (which seems to be OK with 10% real fruit juice for flavor).

Our source of vitamins is from natural sources. I personally like either Lassen's vitamins based out of Ventura, California or Swanson Vitamins, based out of Fargo, North Dakota. For Omega-3 I like Nordic Naturals out of Watsonville, California.

Whether your short-term memory problems are based on factors that can be changed with some detox and vitamins or not, you owe it to yourself to examine what you are or have been consuming.