Sugar, Diabetes, and Alzheimer's & other Dementia

I'll bet you're wondering what all of these topics named in the title of my blog post have to do with one another! Well, I did a stint in an Assisted Living Facility where all employees who worked in close contact with the residents there had to take continued educational online classes each month! One series of those classes was on Dementia patients. The course outlined the many phases patients go through starting from early to late or ending stages before death. 

I just had a thought, "Maybe I should have given a warning signal at the beginning of my blog post because what I am about to say may maybe a little overwhelming for some of you who are still young and under 65-years-of-age, and I don't want to outright shock you."

Okay, I'll finish my post now that I've officially warned all of you. That Dementia course would rock my world, figuratively speaking, not really, it's really true - After I finished viewing the slides and before taking the test at the end, I just sat in my desk chair in shock at what I read in those slides.

What I read was that many Diabetes patients inevitably acquired Alzheimer's or some other form of Dementia. Dementia (I also learned this while taking the continuing education courses) describes a set of symptoms and not just one particular disease. So, someone who has a brain deteriorating disease of any kind such as Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, and Lewy body, has Dementia!

Since I am a Diabetic, I decided right then and there that that was not going to be my fate! Besides, I was too young to end up with an elderly person's disease, or was I! According to those courses on Dementia, I was not too young to get Dementia! That scared the living daylights out of me... I knew for a fact that where I worked people were living there who were slightly older than me but still awfully young to have Dementia. One person was 55-years-old. Oh, and a really young man (he lived there before I went to work there) age 30, had one of these horrid diseases and died within a decade. I am in no way saying he had diabetes and that contributed to him getting this brain disease. No, I am not saying that at all! He happened to inherit the disease from his father or some other close relative who also had the disease when he was young and it killed him. I kept taking my diabetes meds and eating healthy from that day forward. 

Now, we're at the end of 2016, December in fact, and I am trying a promising carb-lowering Dietary Lifestyle diet' called, "Keto'! I consume 20 carbs a day. I was on it for two weeks and stopped temporarily (I don't have time to explain)! However, I am restarting it today now that I have all the ingredients I need to create meal plans).

My point in bringing the young man up is to let everyone I possibly can know that none of us are guaranteed that we won't be getting one of those debilitating diseases. And, we should take as many precautions as we can to help avoid having the same misfortune as the 55-year-old woman I mentioned earlier.

Got it? Good, I hope you have this information engrained in your brain because I sure do have it well preserved in mine!

An article I read this morning from a Pinterest poster's pin in which the author of the article suggestsuggestssuggest suggests we (his readers') observe Lent this coming year, like his friend did last year in 2015, by abstaining from consuming sugared products because his friend reaped some major benefits in doing so!

Here's a snippet of what he wrote about his friend's experience:

​"Are you still motivated to give up sugar for Lent? You might wonder how long it will take until you're free of cravings and side-effects, but there's no answer — everyone is different and no human studies have been done on this. But after 40 days, it's clear that Andrew had overcome the worst, likely even reversing some of his altered dopamine signalling. "I remember eating my first sweet and thinking it was too sweet," he said. "I had to rebuild my tolerance."

By Catherine Davis
​Founder/Blogger
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