Foods versus vitamins to prevent brain shrinkage and/or Alzheimers

May 21, 2:26 PMSacramento Nutrition ExaminerAnne Hart

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Vitamin B 12 and vitamin D must be absorbed before it can work, and the older you are, the less likely you could be able to absorb vitamins from foods or supplements. Getting too much of any fat-soluble vitamin also can build up and become toxic to your body. 

Also, people have different genetic responses to plant-based foods. See the abstract of the  article, Interindividual differences in response to plant-based diets: implications for cancer risk, published in the May 2009 issue of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. Can you tailor your foods to your genome? 

The issues with vitamin B 12 and the other water-soluble vitamins are that they are washed out of the body at the expense of wear and tear on aging kidneys. And vitamin D can build up in the body to toxic levels if you take so much that it gets stored in the body's fat or in the coronary arteries.

Vitamins A, E, and K get stored in fat, and vitamin D gets into the coronary arteries if you get too much of the wrong type (synthetic). And it is theorized that if you have a gene variation, the vitamin D could contribute to hardening of the coronary arteries.

Research is ongoing. On the other hand, research also says vitamin D3 (natural) protects against heart disease when taken with vitamin K-2, the MK-7 form such as found in natto and with the right balance of magnesium. Again, the research is ongoing, some pro, some con. The studies continue.

How do you tailor any nutrient, whole food, or vitamin? What do you take in which form that your body can absorb? What other food sources of vitamin B12 or vitamin D can be used other than cow’s milk? The problem is that cow’s milk (even skimmed milk) is homogenized. That means tiny molecules.

And those little molecules caused by homogenization can creep inside your arteries and clog them, according to past studies. Or is that issue still a theory? Isn't inflammation and infection what causes your arteries to stiffen with calcium that should otherwise be in your bones? And doesn't vitamin K2 prevent that? Theory or proven science? You decide based on the research.

You can select goat's milk, which often requires no homogenization because the fat droplets in goat's milk are smaller to begin with and remain better dispersed in the liquid portion of the milk. According to the Real Milk Articles site, Kurt A. Oster, MD studied the effects of homogenized milk from the early 1960s until the mid 1980s. See the World’s Healthiest Foods site, which mentions the studies: Oster, K., and Ross, D. "The Presence of Ectopic Xanthine Oxidase in Atherosclerotic Plaques and Myocardial Tissues." Proceedings of the Society for Experimental Biology and Medicine, 1973.

Also see the study, Oster KA. Plasmalogen diseases: a new concept of the etiology of the atherosclerotic process. American Journal of Clinical Research 1971:2;30-35.  Homogenization theories still appear online. But milk homogenization continues. The first homogenized milk appeared in Connecticut in 1919. During the 1970s, Dr. Oster theorized that “because homogenization reduces the fat globules to a fraction of their original size, the XO is encapsulated by the new outer membranes of the smaller fat globules which form during the homogenization process.”

Can science prove that the new membrane protected the XO from digestive enzymes? Is the real culprit that the new membrane from homogenized milk allows some XO to pass intact within the fat globules from the gut into the circulatory system?

Thirty years later, according to the Times of India article, “Milk Could Prevent Alzheimer’s," an international team, led by Oxford University, has found that milk is actually one of the best sources of a key vitamin, B12, that is said to “reduce the neurological damage to the brain which can lead to forms of dementia.” In the study, older adults with “low levels of the vitamin, known as B12, suffer twice as much shrinkage of the brain as those with higher levels of the substance in their bodies.”

According to lead researcher Prof David Smith, downing just two glasses of milk everyday would be enough to "increase levels of vitamin B12" to an adequate level. The idea is that by increasing vitamin of B12 in older persons, you could slow cognitive decline.

The problem is there may be other sources of vitamin B12 that are more absorbable than drinking half a quart of milk daily, even if it’s skimmed milk. What’s the safe range of vitamin B12?

And how does an older person with problems absorbing vitamins know that enough, but not too much of vitamin B12 is being absorbed? Too much vitamin B12 can mask certain types of anemia. It’s important not to have low levels of vitamin B12 if your older, and especially if you’re a vegan vegetarian.

How about a sublingual vitamin B12 under the tongue? Would that be better absorbed? And if you take only one vitamin B, it could pull out the rest of the B vitamins from your body.

Even eating fresh blueberries instead of frozen or cooked blueberries pulls vitamin B out of your body. Vitamin B 12 is one of the eight B vitamins.

Vegetarians know it’s found mainly in meat, fish and dairy products. The Oxford University study mentioned that drinking two glasses of milk regularly could help people stave off Alzheimer's disease in old age. But so can other sources of vitamin B 12.

The team of International researchers, led by Oxford University, explains that “milk is one of the rich sources of a key vitamin, thought to reduce the neurological damage to the brain that leads to dementia.”

It’s true that low levels of vitamin B 12 increases the risk of brain shrinkage in older adults. In the Oxford University study, the researchers found that elderly patients with low levels of B12 were twice more likely to suffer shrinkage of the brain than those who had higher levels of the substance in their bodies. According to the Times of India article, Professor David Smith is the lead researcher of the Oxford Project to Investigate Memory and Ageing.

Should you drink two glasses of milk (or skimmed milk) daily to increase your levels of vitamin B12 to the level required in order to prevent your brain from shrinking as you age? Will milk prevent cognitive decline, simply because the amount of vitamin B12 in milk will do it?

Or can you find enough vitamin B 12 in a wide variety of foods or even take sublingual supplements of B12 in the amount safe for you as decided by a knowledgeable healthcare professional? And is the milk industry desperate to find reasons why as you age you should drink more milk?

Is it about competition with the nut and/or grain milk industry or soy milk manufacturers? Or maybe too many people are making their own almond milk and taking liquid ionic multiple minerals?

See, the real problem with aging adults is that most have lower levels of digestive acids that may prevent vitamin B12 from being absorbed from whole foods. So is the solution to take a more absorbable form of vitamin B12 such as a sublingual form in the more absorbable methylcobalamin type?

For example, the patented Homosysteine Complex called HS Fighters, www.HSFighters.com with patented Metafolin ® and bioactive vitamin B12, also contains 50 mg of vitamin B 6, Folate in the active form (Metafolin®) and vitamin B12 as methylcobalamin. Or is the sublingual vitamin B12 even more absorbable for those with low digestive acid levels that can’t absorb vitamins from most foods?

What’s unique about milk, is that, according to Professor Smith, “the binding is readily reversible,” according to the Times of India article. Also see the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition to read the article linking vitamin B 12 to decreased risk of brain shrinkage. Another study of Vitamin D found in fish also boosts brain power.

According to a May 20, 2009 news release from the University of Manchester, a team of University of Manchester scientists working with a team of scientists from various other European centers have shown that higher levels of vitamin D from some exposure of the skin to sunlight and/or eating oily fish, also are associated with improved cognitive function in middle-aged and older men. Lots of different vitamins from foods and some supplements work together, if you can absorb the nutrients, to help your brain's cognitive function and keep it from shrinking faster each decade.

“Association between increased vitamin D and faster information processing was more significant in men aged over 60 years.” Read the study, which compared the cognitive performance of more than 3,000 men aged 40 to 79 years at eight test centers across Europe in the Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry.
 

Photo credits: Flickr.com.