Replied by Nanowriter (Hotspot, Texas) on 04/04/2014

The pharmaceuticals she has taken all her life may have been depleting her of necessary nutrients. See the book "Drug Muggers" to find out more about these drugs in particular.

I suspect that when people have a sudden decline in health and function like your mom, that they are completely tapped out of trace minerals and vitamins.

Replied by Siddavis (Springfield, Mo) on 04/11/2014

Perlmutter's recommendation for neurological degeneration like Alzheimer's, ALS, MS, and Parkinson's is a diet high in saturated fats and extremely low in carbohydrates (ideally 75% saturated fats, 20% protein, and only 5% carbohydrates with the carbohydrates coming only from a few nuts and some greens).

The evidence is that unsaturated fats (seed oils like corn oil, soybean oil, etc.) are a great danger, and lead to cellular damage. This is because unsaturated fats are easily oxidized. This comes from the hydrogen atom next to the double carbon bond in these chains of fat being extremely weak and easily combined with free radicals. And it is no wonder that your mother has thyroid problems because polyunsaturated fats also suppress thyroid function by reacting with iodine at the double carbon bond, thus depriving the thyroid gland of iodine, an essential part of thyroid hormone.

Unlike polyunsaturated fats, saturated fats do not react with iodine. As a matter of fact the way chemists in labs determine if a fat is saturated or unsaturated is to see how much iodine a given amount of fat absorbs.

Carbohydrates break down into blood sugar. A teaspoon of wheat actually has more glucose in it than a teaspoon of table sugar because table sugar is 1/2 glucose and 1/2 fructose. When you ingest carbohydrates, you body produces insulin to bring down glucose presence in your blood because otherwise you would die from too much sugar in your blood as has happened to many type I diabetics over the years. The insulin carries the glucose into your cells to be stored or burned as fuel, but over the years your cells develop resistance to insulin as a protective measure since the repeated high amounts of insulin from eating a diet high in carbohydrates causes cellular inflammation. Type II diabetes is a result of this insulin resistance in cells, and what is being called type III diabetes is that same resistance that develops in nerve cells. In type III diabetes, the nerve cells start to die from the inability to import glucose, and neurological diseases like your mother's degeneration follow.

What a high fat, low carbohydrate diet does is starve your body of glucose, and keeps your blood sugar so low that insulin production is suppressed. To compensate ketone bodies like beta-hydroxybuterate are produced from fats. These are easily absorbed into all your cells for fuel without needing insulin, and are particularly favored by brain cells. Adaptation to burning ketone bodies happens in a very short time (days, not months). You don't need carbohydrates to live as native populations in the Arctic prove since they can't grow plants to eat; however, you would die without fats and proteins. Any glucose your body might need is manufactured in your liver by breaking down the protein in your diet in the process called neoglycogenesis. You will no doubt be told by the poorly informed that ketosis is dangerous. It is not because in nutritional ketosis resulting from a low carbohydrate diet, it is controlled by your bodies continued ability to produce insulin if needed. Diabetics can't produce enough insulin no matter what, so they can go into ketoacidosis which is the uncontrolled production of ketone bodies, which can be fatal to them without insulin injections. If you mother doesn't need insulin injections now, she would have no problem with ketosis.

I can see you would have a big problem getting a nursing home to feed your mom the ketogenic diet she needs. Too many physicians buy into the low fat, high carbohydrate "heart healthy" baloney even though the evidence says they are wrong, and in fact evidence shows the original study that led to the low fat diet fad was scientific fraud at worst or scientific incompetence at best engineered by Ansel Keys in the 1950's.

What your mom should be eating is at least three tablespoons a day of MCT oil (medium chain triglyceride oil) or unrefined organic extra virgin coconut oil which you can get at a good price at Sam's club. She should be eating eggs, bacon, heavy cream, high fat cheeses, fatty steaks, liver, and fatty pork. She should not eat any starchy vegetables, cereals, breads or other grains; no sugars or sweets of any kind; no sodas.

Read the antioxidants that Dr. Permutter recommends and give her those, too.

As for the thyroid issue, like most people she probably doesn't get enough iodine and thyroid deficiency diseases result. You might need to watch her thyroid hormone levels because eliminating polyunsaturated fats will free up some iodine, and she might make more of her own thyroid hormone. She at a minimum should be taking selenium which regulates her own thyroid hormone, and should have as a goal to wean herself from the artificial thyroid hormones she has been prescribed, and replace them with iodine supplements.

if you can find a iodine friendly, ketone friendly doctor, I would say that is about your best shot. If you try this yourself while she is at a nursing home, they might take you to court and force her to eat the garbage they feed at nursing homes.

I personally have done this diet for myself, to address neurological degeneration and lost 70 pounds in the process, a nice side effect. But I read many, many books and research studies, and was not as badly deteriorated as you say is your mother. I take 25 mg of iodine (Iodoral) a day along with 400 mcg of selenium and 500 mg of L-tyrosine in addition to a general health food type vitamin and mineral regimen. I live on about 1,500 kcalories a day with 75% coming from fat, and 20% coming from protein, and I love it. Yum, yum. I avoid doctors but did get my blood work done and all my numbers are well within normal range; the doctor who I went to just scratched his head because being indoctrinated in the faulty wisdom of medical school he couldn't bring himself to believe that a high fat diet was healthful.

All this information is available on the internet if you look hard enough. Good luck.