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An eggcellent dietary habit to keep your brain healthy and help prevent Alzheimer's Disease · Hardiness with Dr Paul Taylor

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  Speaker 1: Hey, everyone, welcome to another edition of Wisdom Wednesdays. Today,
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  Speaker 1: I want to talk about a simple dietary habit that
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  Speaker 1: could very significantly reduce your risk of dementia and Alzheimer's
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  Speaker 1: disease and also maintain your cognitive function as you get older.
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  Speaker 2: And it's all about eggs.
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  Speaker 1: So eggs have been traditionally pretty well maligned from nutrition.
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  Speaker 1: We were told ten or fifteen years ago that we
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  Speaker 1: shouldn't eat eggs because they were high in cholesterol, and
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  Speaker 1: that scarred a lot of people off for many, many years.
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  Speaker 1: And we know that that is actually bullshit because the
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  Speaker 1: cholesterol that you eat has a very very minimal impact
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  Speaker 1: on your actual blood cholesterol, and many people would actually
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  Speaker 1: question cholesterol as a marker of any thing. But putting
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  Speaker 1: that aside, I want to talk about a number of
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  Speaker 1: different studies that basically point towards the idea of higher
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  Speaker 1: egg consumption, particularly if you value your brain. So the
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  Speaker 1: first study that I wanted to talk about is something
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  Speaker 1: called the Adventist Health Study too. So this was looking
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  Speaker 1: at forty thousand adults. They were seven day adventists, and
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  Speaker 1: they followed these guys for fifteen years, and what they
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  Speaker 1: find is that those who had a higher egg intake
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  Speaker 1: had a twenty seven percent lower incidence of Alzheimer's disease. Now,
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  Speaker 1: some people have kind of criticized that study a little
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  Speaker 1: bit because they are a very healthy group and you
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  Speaker 1: have what's called the healthy user bias. But they were
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  Speaker 1: measuring people against each other within the same group, and
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  Speaker 1: they find that the reference range in this study was
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  Speaker 1: people who rarely eggs or had less than two a week,
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  Speaker 1: so they were the best line, and they compared the
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  Speaker 1: other groups to those. So they find that those who
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  Speaker 1: had two to four eggs a week, which they classified
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  Speaker 1: as moderate intake, they had a twenty percent reduction in
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  Speaker 1: Alzheimer's disease, and those who had five plus eggs a week,
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  Speaker 1: and they had a twenty seven percent reduction. So this
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  Speaker 1: is what we say, what we call a dose response,
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  Speaker 1: and this is one of the things that actually strengthens
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  Speaker 1: the evidence when you're looking at observational studies. Is there
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  Speaker 1: this dose response I EAD, if you do more of something,
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  Speaker 1: then the signal gas to get stronger.
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  Speaker 2: And that is exactly what they find in this study.
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  Speaker 1: And there is a mechanism, a very plausible understanding mechanism
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  Speaker 1: which again is another one of the processes that we go, Okay,
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  Speaker 1: it's an observational study, but.
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  Speaker 2: Now there's greater evidence. Is there a dose response?
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  Speaker 1: Is there a pla lausible biological mechanism, And the plausible
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  Speaker 1: mechanism is all about acetyl coline. So acetyl coline is
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  Speaker 1: a neurotransmitter and memory runs on acetyl coline. Alzheimer's it
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  Speaker 1: turns out, destroys the neurons that actually make it, now colin,
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  Speaker 1: which is found in eggs. In fact, it is eggs
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  Speaker 1: are the highest source of coline in any food, and
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  Speaker 1: coaline is known to cross the bloodbing barrier and it's
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  Speaker 1: then converted to acetyl coline, the neurotransmitter inside these cholinergic neurons.
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  Speaker 1: And these neurons are the ones that protect the basal
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  Speaker 1: four bran to the cortex and the hippocampus and form
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  Speaker 1: the brain's memory and attention infrastructure. And it has been
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  Speaker 1: shown that seventy five percent of these cholinergic neurons actually
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  Speaker 1: die in Alzheimer's disease, and their projections to the cortex
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  Speaker 1: and the hippocampus are the first the collapse before the
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  Speaker 1: plaque pathology becomes severe. So it's upstream of those plaques
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  Speaker 1: that are associated with Alzheimer's disease. And then the next
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  Speaker 1: study I wanted to talk about was actually published in
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  Speaker 1: twenty fourteen, and this actually followed a bunch of people
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  Speaker 1: for a number of years and some of them ended
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  Speaker 1: up with Alzheimer's disease. But what they were able to
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  Speaker 1: show was that by tracking levels of phospho lipids in
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  Speaker 1: their actual brand, they find that phosphittal coalings started to
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  Speaker 1: drop off in the group that developed Alzheimer's disease about
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  Speaker 1: three years before the diagnosis, whereas the healthy controls they
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  Speaker 1: maintained the consistent level of phosphittal coalings in their briants.
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  Speaker 1: And so it was this drop off that actually drove
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  Speaker 1: or precipitated the diagnosis a few years later. And then
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  Speaker 1: if we then broadened the lens a little bit to
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  Speaker 1: look at other cohort studies, there are five different cohort
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  Speaker 1: studies that pretty much found the same thing. So the
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  Speaker 1: first study was the Adventist Health study that I talked
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  Speaker 1: about right at the start, where they followed forty thousand
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  Speaker 1: people over fifteen years, and they found that those who
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  Speaker 1: had five plus eggs a week had a twenty seven
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  Speaker 1: percent reduction in Alzheimer's incidents versus those who who didn't
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  Speaker 1: need eggs or at them very rarely. And then another
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  Speaker 1: finish study that was published in twenty nineteen. They had
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  Speaker 1: two and a half thousand participants and they followed these
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  Speaker 1: guys for twenty two years and they looked at levels
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  Speaker 1: of phosphoryl coaling and they found that those in the
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  Speaker 1: highest twenty five percent had a twenty eight percent reduction
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  Speaker 1: in dementia incidents versus those in the lowest quartile. Then
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  Speaker 1: the Framingham Offspring studies you may have heard the Framingham
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  Speaker 1: Study in the United States has a huge study that's
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  Speaker 1: been ongoing, and then they followed the kids their offspring.
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  Speaker 1: This study was published in the American Journal of Clinical
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  Speaker 1: Nutrition in twenty twenty two. There was over three thousand
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  Speaker 1: participants followed for sixteen years, and they find that those
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  Speaker 1: who had low total coaling intake less than two hundred
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  Speaker 1: and twenty milligrams per day, they had a significant increased
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  Speaker 1: risk of developing Alzheimer's or other forms of dementia. Then
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  Speaker 1: another cohort study in the United States published in the
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  Speaker 1: Journal of Nutrition in twenty twenty four. They're over one
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  Speaker 1: thousand people followed for almost seven years, and they find
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  Speaker 1: that having more than one egg a week versus those
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  Speaker 1: who had less than one egg a week was a
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  Speaker 1: forty seven.
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  Speaker 2: Percent reduction in Alzheimer's dementia.
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  Speaker 1: And then one of the UK biobank studies you've heard
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  Speaker 1: me talk about this before, there's a huge amount of
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  Speaker 1: people that have been studied for many, many years. In
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  Speaker 1: this sub cohort the published in the American Journal of
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  Speaker 1: Clinical Nutrition twenty twenty five, they had one hundred and
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  Speaker 1: twenty five thousand people followed for nearly twelve years, and
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  Speaker 1: they find that having moderate intakes of coling about three
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  Speaker 1: hundred and thirty milligrams a day, and they had a
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  Speaker 1: twenty percent lower dementia incident than those who were in
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  Speaker 1: the second are sorry in the lowest quartile.
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  Speaker 2: So taken together, all.
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  Speaker 1: Of those different studies showing the exact same thing and
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  Speaker 1: having that plausible biological mechanism really starts to present this
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  Speaker 1: as strong evidence. And it turns out that egg eaters
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  Speaker 1: hit the coaling target they recommended intake for coling at
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  Speaker 1: twenty four times the rate of non egg eaters, right,
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  Speaker 1: so fifty seven percent of egg consumers meet the adequate
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  Speaker 1: intake of coling on a daly and only two and
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  Speaker 1: a half percent of non egg consumers do. So this
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  Speaker 1: isn't subtle. This is very very significant.
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  Speaker 2: So what does this mean for us?
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  Speaker 1: Three eggs a day if you're a woman actually hits
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  Speaker 1: that intake just on its own, just from eating three
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  Speaker 1: eggs a day, if you're a man eating four eggs
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  Speaker 1: a day and gives you that intake, and there is
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  Speaker 1: no other food that practically comes anywhere close to eggs
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  Speaker 1: in terms of cooling an intake.
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  Speaker 2: So this for me is pretty strong signal.
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  Speaker 1: There is consistent reports across all different observational studies. There's
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  Speaker 1: a very strong plausible biological mechanism, and a load the
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  Speaker 1: proof isn't causal for me, it's certainly enough to get
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  Speaker 1: eggs down your neck on a regular basis.
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  Speaker 2: That's it this week, folks, Catch you next time.