The prevalence of Alzheimer’s and the unfortunate lack of success with conventional medicine in treating patient’s with Alzheimer’s is disheartening to say the least.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), globally, about 50 million people have dementia, and Alzheimer’s disease is the most common form of dementia, accounting for 60-70% of cases. The prevalence of Alzheimer’s disease increases with age, and it is estimated that about 5-8% of people aged 65 years and older have the disease worldwide!
Unfortunately, the success of drug therapy for Alzheimer’s disease has been limited, with no known cure or disease-modifying treatment currently available. While some drugs may provide temporary relief from symptoms, such as memory loss and cognitive decline, they do not stop the progression of the disease itself while also coming with a list of unwanted side effects.
Additionally, the efficacy of these drugs varies widely among patients, and there is no consensus on the best treatment approach. This has led to frustration among patients, caregivers, and healthcare professionals alike, highlighting the urgent need for better treatments.
Luckily, there are treatments that improve brain function enormously! Yet in our current healthcare system, treatments that are not profitable rarely (if ever) become part of the standard of care.
This is why we empower ourselves!
In this podcast, Mary Newport and I explore Alzheimer’s disease and the role of ketones vs. glucose in fueling a brain with Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia.
Mary Newport, M.D. practiced neonatology, the care of sick and premature newborns, for thirty years and was founding medical director for two newborn intensive care units in the Tampa Bay area of Florida. More recently, she practiced at the opposite end of the spectrum, providing hospice care and health risk assessments.
In 2008, a ketogenic nutritional intervention with coconut and medium-chain triglyceride oil dramatically helped her husband Steve Newport, who had early-onset Alzheimer’s disease, resulting in nearly four better quality years.
Her fourth book Clearly Keto for Healthy Brain Aging and Alzheimer’s Prevention focuses on a whole food ketogenic Mediterranean-style diet and other lifestyle modifications to help maintain brain health and prevent Alzheimer’s and other dementias.
The third edition of her first book, Alzheimer’s Disease: What If There Was a Cure? The Story of Ketones will be in published September 2023.
Resources:
- Links
- Books:
AI Generated Transcript:
CAVIN 0:11
Hello, everybody. Welcome to the adventures and brain injury podcast. My name is Cavin Balaster. I’m a severe traumatic brain injury survivor who was given less than a 10% chance of recovery beyond a persistent vegetative state. I recovered from being unable to eat walk or talk for months, left wrist totally flexed inward, breathing through a tube in my neck, receiving nutrition from a tube in my belly, and lots when in my recovery. And I’m so excited to bring you this podcast, where I interview some really brilliant people on brain health and what we can do to give our brains the best shot to recover and optimize.
So I’m super excited to have Mary Newport on the podcast with us. She is… well, I’m gonna let her tell you a bit about herself. Hi, Mary, how you doing?
MARY 0:59
Hi, Cavin, how are you?
CAVIN 1:01
I’m doing great. Yeah.
MARY 1:03
Your story is amazing. And I really enjoyed reading your book. There’s so much great information in there. Many other things, you know, to improve brain health. So we improve like you have improved. It’s just tremendous.
CAVIN 1:18
Thank you. Yeah. Well, you are trained as a medical doctor, right?
MARY 1:23
Right, right. I’m a physician, an MD I trained at University of Cincinnati College of Medicine and did pediatrics at Children’s Hospital Medical Center in Cincinnati. And then in Charleston, South Carolina. I did a fellowship in neonatology, which is newborn intensive care. And I practice that in Florida and the Tampa Bay area, Florida for 30 years. You know, so my main interest as a physician was in newborns, but my husband Steve developed early onset Alzheimer’s disease, which led me on a completely different path.
CAVIN 1:54
Right. Right. Yeah. Well, then speaking of Tampa, we’re very close right now. Yeah. Just South Tampa, you just north of Tampa?
MARY 2:04
About 30 minutes.
CAVIN 2:07
Yeah, we’ll connect at some point. But alright. So tell me about how your husband how we started showing signs.
MARY 2:15
Yeah. So my husband was an accountant. And that was extremely convenient for our family because he could stay home and work for my practice. He was the manager and accountant for our practice. And I’m with hospital based, I didn’t have an office, you know, outside of the hospital. And that made it possible for him to take care of our children when I was working. And so I just owe so much to him, because he got it made it possible for me to be a doctor and a mother, which were my two dreams. But in spite of being a very creative person, very active, he kayaked all the time you read all the times, was on a computer all the time he started losing ground, when he was about 51 years old, he started having memory issues and would procrastinate on tax returns. And then it became worrisome when he started for getting a big bend of the bank of the post office in a given day. And he was only 51 at that point. You know, I’m two years younger than he was and you know, so I thought this isn’t normal. And so he saw a neuro psychiatrist, he happened to also be depressed. And I think he was depressed because he knew he was losing ground. He always knew he had Alzheimer’s all the way along. And he knew what he’d been able to do and what he couldn’t do anymore. And he was very frustrated and depressed about it. But the doctor felt that his memory issues were most likely related to depression, not the other way around, and gave him some antidepressants. He kind of plugged along, but continued to get worse over the next couple of years. And at age 54, he was officially diagnosed with early Alzheimer’s disease. And now as you can imagine, that was a huge blow. I had never heard of Alzheimer’s happening, and somebody that young for one thing early on sets before age 65 when he was only 54, at diagnosis, and you know, so our future looked really bleak at that point. And he basically continued to decline. We moved about an hour north and so I could open another newborn intensive care unit. And he could not find his way around this very small town, Spring Hill, Florida. couldn’t read a map anymore. Just some things became real obvious at that point. And, and that’s when he was diagnosed 2004 kept getting worse. 2006 couldn’t even remember how to turn on a computer, much less work on it all day, and he had to stop driving. That year. He got lost went to Jacksonville, which is on the other coast of Florida instead of coming home one night, when he was supposed to follow my daughter she’d had like our car broke down, and I was on call. I couldn’t come with him. So you know, he was declining fairly rapidly. And by 2008 He was very slow. You know, he would slowly pick up his feet to walk you couldn’t run he He had tremors in his hands and his jaw, he couldn’t finish sentences couldn’t finish little tasks. He’d forget what he was doing like gardening, digging the hole, he’d forget if he was digging it out or filling it up, but he would get very confused about everything. And two clinical trials came along. And there hadn’t been any for quite a while. And he had not ever qualified for one before this. But two studies came along with two different drugs, the screenings were in two different locations, and they happen to be two days in a row. And so I got on the internet the night before the first screening to look at the risk and the benefits of the two drugs, just in case he would get accepted into both we would have to choose. And I happen on a press release about a medical food that was going to come out in about a year. And it had already had some phase two studies. And they showed that it improved the memory and cognition and nearly half of the people with Alzheimer’s who receive this food, this medical food, and this was in a single dose study, and
CAVIN 5:58
how do they differentiate? How would what do they call a medical food?
MARY 6:03
Basically, it allows the company to make claims about the product because they’ve done clinical trials, or that there are clinical trials, and they can show, yes, this has shown benefit in clinical trials, and then they can make claims. The other thing about medical foods is that they often require a prescription, you know, which makes it much more difficult to get them. So but they were on this pathway, and it wasn’t going to come out for another year. And they didn’t say in a press release what it was, but I was able to find their patent application. They call it ac 1202 At that point, which didn’t give you any clues. And so I dug into the patch.
CAVIN 6:41
Did you I saw in your book, and I looked it up. Yeah, yeah.
MARY 6:45
Yeah. So it’s talked about an aspect of Alzheimer’s that I was not very familiar with at all that it’s a type of diabetes to the brain. And 10 to 20 years before a person gets Alzheimer’s, they start having problems getting glucose into the brain and into brain cells and certain parts of the brain. And it just progresses from there. It just, you know, that spreads throughout the brain, it gets worse and worse as the disease progresses. And you know, a person can be, you know, normal on testing for 10 or 20 years with this problem going on and not know that they’re headed to Alzheimer’s. So their idea was to use MCT oil, medium chain triglyceride oil. And the reason why that could possibly help is because when you consume it, no matter what you eat, if you consume MCT oil, your liver will convert part of it to ketones. And ketones are an alternative fuel to glucose in the brain. And they don’t require insulin to get into the brain or into brain cells. And, you know, basically, to get glucose into cells requires insulin either directly or indirectly, you know, so there’s this problem of insulin resistance and insulin deficiency in the brain and Alzheimer’s. So ketones could provide fuel to the brain to these brain cells. It was theoretical hadn’t been proven yet, quite at that point. But their studies suggested that, you know, this might actually be feasible. And I learned in the patent application, there was one time in parenthesis that MCT oil was extracted from coconut oil that said coconut or palm oil, and technically, it’s not extracted from Palm oil is extracted from the seed of the palm fruit. And the orange part of the fruit is used to make palm oil, the center seed as a white colonel, and that has the medium chain triglycerides in it, it’s very similar to coconut oil and its composition. So I thought was interesting. And I knew what MCT oil was, because I’m a newborn specialist and neonatologist. Back in the 80s, we used to give MCT oil to our tiniest previous we’d add it to each other feedings, they absorbed it very well, and they would gain weight faster and go home faster. And then they started adding MCT oil directly to infant formulas they still do today. They started adding coconut oil, almost every if you look at the label, almost every commercial infant formula has coconut and or palm kernel oil to provide these medium chain triglycerides. And the reason that is is because they’re in breast milk, they’re trying to mimic breast milk when they put the fats into these infant formulas. So I knew what MCT oil was. And I thought, Okay, we gotta give this a go. But at this point, it’s like 1am in the morning, and he’s set up for a screening at 9am. So I had not a chance to do anything about that. In the meantime, you know, we desperately wanted him to get into a trial too. So he went for the screening. He needed 16 out of 30 points on it on a memory test called the mini mental status exam. That’s a cognitive test. And he got only 14 points needed 16 And we were extremely disappointed, and the doctor asked him to draw a clock. I actually got a picture of it here in my book. If you could see it Does that look like a clock?
CAVIN 10:03
No, that’s new. Half the clock never had a brain on fire by Susanna Cahalan.
MARY 10:10
I’ve read I I’m familiar with it. It’s been a while since I didn’t read it a while.
CAVIN 10:16
She also talks about the clock test. And yeah, she had everything squished on one side, right? I couldn’t quite tell.
MARY 10:26
There’s no circle, there’s little circles, bunch of little circles and four numbers, right. 910 1112 kind of going up. It’s very disorganized, then, you know? Yeah, the doctor said, you know, this is a sign that he’s on the verge of severe Alzheimer’s. And I kind of knew that, but it really hit home. When I saw that clock, I couldn’t believe it. And so on the way home, knowing he had a screening, the next day, I thought, Okay, we’re gonna stop at a health food store and get coconut oil. And, you know, up to that point, I had been taught in medical school that coconut oil was an artery clogging fat, you know, and it was fun to be in health food stores. But I thought, you know, his brain is dying. Didn’t know, we’re going to worry about that right now. And I picked up the coconut oil. And when I got home, I looked at the that kind of got back on the internet. And I had to remind myself, which were the medium chain triglycerides, and I was able to get the fatty acid composition of coconut oil, and figured out how much coconut oil I would need to give him to be to give him an equivalent amount of the MCT that they gave in the medical food. 20 grams is what they had given in their study. So I came up with 35 grams with just a little over two tablespoons of coconut oil. So that’s how I arrived at what I gave him. And that’s a lot of coconut oil to take for the first time. So the next day, his screening was at one in the afternoon, which was also fortunate because it gave us a chance to give him the coconut oil at breakfast. It’s kind of solid at room temperature and a lot of homes. Yeah, it’s creamy, kind of a creamy solid oil. And so I put it in oatmeal, and which is warm, it melts right away. And so he ate it. And about four hours later, he was taking the test, again, the mini mental status exam at a different location at a different town. And he gained four points, and he qualified for the study the got up to 18 points. And you know, I didn’t know if it was just really good luck or prayers or hope, or, you know, or that it was really this, but I thought okay, there may be something to this. And, you know, I had already learned, you know, in medical school that during starvation, you know, your body uses up glucose quickly, but then starts breaking down fat and using ketones, and that’s what protects your brain during starvation. So I knew I had a bit of a scientific background, and I even remembered that oh, yeah, MCT is are converted to ketones in the liver. You know, those were things that came out in the 1960s. So I was familiar with that. And I thought, okay, there’s a scientific basis, we’re going to keep doing this. So I started giving him little over two tablespoons every morning. And then I thought, you know, when I read the patent application, the MCT is the ketones peaked at about an hour and a half or two hours. And then they were pretty much gone at three hours. And I thought, well, the brain needs fuel, and it’s very energy hungry, and it needs fuel 24/7. So I’m gonna give it to him also throughout the day. So I got my hands on every cookbook and recipe I could find, and just started cooking with it. And he would sometimes just take it on a spoon or whatever. But usually I tried to cook it and make it interesting and nice.
CAVIN 13:44
That’s what I do. I literally have a jar of raw honey, coconut oil and like a jar of some sort of nut butter. And one of my favorite little snacks she knows. Sounds delicious. Like, it’s funny. My housemate is a personal trainer. And, like, watch me he’s like, how many calories? Do you think you just ingested? And I’m like, let’s find out. And then like,
MARY 14:13
you don’t look like you’re fat.
CAVIN 14:18
700 and like once that? Yeah, no, no, no, I need to gain weight. Actually. That’s what we’re working on right now. Yeah, we’re going on? Yeah. So yeah. So yeah, well, you’re you’re looking up all these recipes, and looking at how you can make this more palatable. Right, even though
MARY 14:41
we were already on a Mediterranean diet, we had switched over or in a couple years earlier. You know, I read that. A study in which people that had the most Mediterranean like diet whole food diet lived on average for years longer than people with Alzheimer’s with the least Mediterranean like diet, and that was the first time it ever occurred to me that nutrition hit anything Do it. But he is still declining because they are the same boom. Yeah, yeah. And so we, you know, with adding the extra oil and all of that over the next few days, things change so dramatically. You know, Steve said the day he started the coconut oil was like a light switch came on in his brain, he felt that and he his mood, I mean, he was still quite depressed at that point. And his mood shifted very quickly, he started walking more normally, more quickly, his job tremor completely went away. He still had a little bit of a hand tremor in the morning, but after 2030 minutes after I’d have the coconut oil, it would stop and then started conversation sort of flowing the server whistling again and telling jokes again, and I’m like, Oh, my gosh, and you know, so, and he knew that there was a big difference. And so we talked about the fifth day, you know, we’re like, our life has changed, something has changed. And this is real. So, you know, I basically called Dr. Richard beech, who I found in Wikipedia was a world expert on ketones. And he was at the NIH, he spent decades the NIH and starting in the 1990s, he started intensively studying ketones as possible therapeutics. And he had written several hypothesis papers around 2003, about the potential for ketones to help with diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s and MS and traumatic brain injury. And, you know, many other you know, congestive heart failure, recovery from heart attack, many different possibilities. And you know, because ketones are a primitive fuel, they’re a very basic fuel that turns out the heart and the kidneys love this fuel. So I thought I have to try to talk to him. And I had a list of questions. And I held the phone and he answered himself, I was like, blown away. And we had a wonderful conversation. And, you know, basically, I asked him theoretically, do you think somebody if somebody took coconut oil that it could help with Alzheimer’s? And he said, Oh, I don’t think so. You know, he’d been developing a ketone Ester that would get very high levels. And he said, I just don’t think levels that low of ketones would have any effect on somebody with Alzheimer’s. And he mentioned the medical food and that Dr. Sam Henderson, who was the head developed that product, had the idea to use MCT oil. I’m had called him like a few years earlier and asked the same question, and I didn’t tell him right away what we were doing with the coconut oil, but, you know, but he sent me a couple papers and, and, you know, I kept reading, reading, reading. And then at the two week, Mark, Steve, did a another look into another and the edge there, but you can see, it’s a circle. It’s got all the numbers there. And they’re, they’re not beautiful. And as always, folks, they he told me later, he was trying to line up the numbers across on each other. Okay, that’s what he was doing. I thought it was like, voice got a lot of hands on. Hands on. Yeah, but he’s just trying to and then, you know, you can see the one from two months later. Oh, no. That was a little over a month later. That one’s a little neater, you know,
CAVIN 18:08
who’s much better circle. That’s
MARY 18:11
right. And he started writing again, and kind of thing too. But he, you know, by two months, he could tie his own shoes. Again, people with Alzheimer’s, forget how to tie their shoes. And he started, he was completely walking normally, he could run he could pick up his feet and run. And about three and a half months, he announced that he could read again. And I said, Well, why couldn’t you read he had been able to read for about a year and a half. And he said, The words would look like they were going into pixels on a page and moving around on the page. And that had stopped. And that was interesting. And you know, he had one time we were at an appointment, and he pointed to a thermostat on the wall. And he said, Look at that. It’s shaking all over the place. And I’m like, What’s that? And it wasn’t, you know, that that’s what his brain was seeing. It wasn’t his eyes, it was spraying. But now he could read and he continued to improve. And about nine or 10 months, he could remember what he read hours earlier. For example, you know, he read something in Scientific American about Albert Einstein, and he told me all about it a few hours later, and details of the story. And then he’d remember things that happened two or three weeks earlier, like if there had been a volcano erupting and this kind of thing. And so he was doing well enough that he was able to come and work as a volunteer at the hospital that I was working at working in the warehouse, he’d helped deliver supplies and put stickers on supplies and his supervision. But nonetheless, he had a purpose again, you know, he would do this a couple of days a week. He loved it. And, you know, it made him feel useful again, and much less depressed and, you know, so that’s basically the gist of his story. He was also the Well, that’s the beginning of the story. He was also the first person with Alzheimer’s to do a pilot study with the ketone Ester that Dr. Veatch developed. So this was such Only 10 Two years later. And he, it kept him stable. And we kept the the oils going to it kept them stable for another 20 months. And sadly, Steve had a seizure, which is common in Alzheimer’s. And about 20% of people have it. And the first time he had it, he was standing and he fell straight back and hit his head. And he went unconscious, he stopped breathing, he turned blue, there was a lady who normally took care of him with him. I was at the hospital. And when I got home, he was still blue, the AMS wasn’t there yet. So he had kind of a prolonged period in which he sustained more brain injury, and his brain was already fragile, you know, from Alzheimers, so he didn’t recover from that, despite, you know, giving them continuing the oils and the ketone ester and, and he did pass away in early 2016. From Alzheimer’s disease,
CAVIN 20:53
right? Yeah. It’s like there’s, you know, something that’s that I’ve seen is, there’s a lot of shame. That goes along with that with Alzheimer’s with a lot of people I was and just kind of like, in neurodegenerative diseases were just even age related cognitive decline, you know, and, I mean, there’s a lot of stigma surrounding it, and whatnot. I really liked what you also said about, you know, a scene with our brain, you know, because I say we look with our eyes, we see with our brain, we think with our brain, yes, yes. But yeah, it’s super interesting. And it’s up to us to kind of alleviate some of that stigma. So that those with with Alzheimer’s and cognitive decline, things can feel comfortable telling us whether I wasn’t thinking, you know, and like, yeah, it’s a little scary, but it’s not like, it’s, there are things that can be done. Awesome. Yeah. So,
MARY 21:57
you know, regarding that, you know, we’ve found this and so many other people have told me the same thing. You know, as soon as you tell a family member or a friend that the person has Alzheimer’s, it’s like, there’s a big red a, they never look at you the same. You know, and a lot of people lose friends, they lose contact with friends. At that point, they, Steve, one of his close relatives that he was great friends with. Soon as he heard that Steve had Alzheimer’s, he backed off. And he, he avoided him, we went to visit, you know, our family in Cincinnati. And he avoided him. And he told me later, because I just didn’t know what to say to him. And it hurt Steve’s feelings so badly, because he wasn’t, you know, at that point, it was still, you know, it’s a slow process. And he wasn’t deep into it yet, at that point. But yet, you know, this person just couldn’t talk to him. And then I had another family member later, say, you know, you know, she didn’t really want to ever see him again. She said, she’d prefer to just remember him the way he was, like, well, lucky you. You got to remember him the way he was, you know, why avoid them? You know, at that point, it’s just the different feelings that people have about it, and then others help so much, you know, one of my sisters ended up getting very involved in helping me and she was even there with me, you know, when he passed away, and, you know, eternally grateful to her, that she did that for me, and that she’s been such a support before and after. So, you know, people respond differently. But, you know, that stigma is, it’s a big problem. It’s a big problem that happens with cancer, too. You know, you’re they have cancer, you know, that’s what you think about when you see them? You know,
CAVIN 23:41
it’s, I mean, we end with brain injury, you know, like neurological conditions in general. But yeah, even with with cancer and things like that, they start looking at you like you’re a dead man. Right. Right. That’s I have not personally experienced that. But I have to have said, exactly that, you know, yeah. Well, I think it’s great that, you know, with coconut oil and ketones as a separate fuel source, you know, because that’s what’s so important. I mean, there’s, there’s actually, there’s been studies that show one or two tablespoons of coconut oil in the morning, is more effective at preventing seizures than many seizure medications. Have you heard that?
MARY 24:27
I need to get that study for that. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah, what started getting the message out, I started hearing from a lot of people and I did hear that from a couple people, a child with autism that had seizures like throughout the day and the night and they would keep the child in bed and the child didn’t have any seizures for three days after they started coconut oil at least three days. And then there were other people, two adults that told me the same thing. I had other people with traumatic brain injury that felt that it really greatly helped them recover. You know, baby sickly, they were just adding coconut oil. And I also have collected by collected 360 what I call little case reports or emails, mostly in some letters from people who just wanted to let me know how they did you know, when they were taking coconut oil. And, you know, this was I collected, like every single email I got from 2008 to 2014. And I would put them on all on an Excel spreadsheet, you know, with verbatim, you know, copy paste from their emails, and I developed a little kind of a, how to categorize the improvements that they were reporting. And I presented this poster presentations at several different conferences then. And now that I have this many, I’m actually just been accepted to give a poster presentation at the Alzheimer’s Association conference in July showing these case reports where’s that? It’s an Amsterdam. Oh, wow. Yeah, so I get to go to Amsterdam to do this presentation. I actually have two posters. The other is the personalized strategy for like a protocol, I guess, for increasing ketones staying in ketosis to help people with memory impairment. And, you know, it includes some of the other things that are ketogenic, like overnight fasting, you know, if you fast for at least 10 to 12 hours, your liver will be you know, you’ll use up the glucose is stored in your liver and you’ll go into ketosis. And so overnight fasting can increase ketosis exercise, vigorous exercise can increase ketones, and then, you know, incorporating the oils, coconut and or MCT oil into the diet into meals, that will help get somebody into ketosis, like immediately, and help sustain it. And then eating a low carb, you know, healthy lower carb, higher fat diet. And also, depending on how much fat it is, you can have anywhere from mild nutritional ketosis to deep nutritional ketosis, which, you know, basically people that have seizures, or they have cancer that they’re fighting, they can use the ketogenic diet to support the standard of care treatment for cancer. And at least three dozen studies I know of going on right now for different types of cancer and ketogenic diets. But you know, these are just different ways of maintaining ketosis. And then of course, exogenous ketones, ketone esters, and ketones, salts, and I usually tell people, you know, think of the oils as part of your diet, just work them into your diet, it’s very easy to cook with them and add them to different foods. And then, you know, think of the exogenous ketones as a way to further boost your ketone level on top of that, and, you know, the effect lasts for usually four or five hours. But I found, you know, I, I do little studies on myself, you know, with ketone and glucose levels, blood levels, and then I have a breath analyzer, I do all these little studies, with different ways of combining, you know, the oils and the exogenous ketones. And if you take MCT oil at the same time as a ketone Ester or a ketone salt, it seems to help sustain the level much longer. So, yeah, and
CAVIN 28:12
we just had a conversation with Dr. D’Agostino on the blog. And we were talking about ketone salts, ketone esters, and actually went to his lab at USF. And he was the one concern he has about ketone esters. They’re hard on the liver, so hard on the liver and kidneys. And but the ketone salts seemed to be pretty, pretty sick, you know. So that’s, that’s his preference on that. And then I was curious. I mean, when we’re digesting all this fat, our body needs to emulsify it with bile. And here’s Do you have anything to say on that? Or me? Who studies people who weren’t producing enough bile? or anything of that sort?
MARY 29:00
Yeah. Well, you know, people that don’t have a gallbladder may have an issue. I don’t have a gallbladder. And the first time that Steve took coconut oil, I took the same amount of it, which was over two tablespoons, and I got big time indigestion. But I backed off, and some people will just get they’ll have massive diarrhea if they try to take too much right away.
CAVIN 29:23
We call it disaster pants. Yes, yes.
MARY 29:28
So I always warn people I say either way, MCT coconut oil to start with maybe a half to one teaspoon, two or three times a day, take it with food. And if you haven’t a food that you can stretch it out. I mean, it’s something that you’re eating, stretch it out over 10 or 15 or 20 minutes that you’re eating it and we’ll go and we’re slowly you know, you’ll still get the ketones but you know, and then just increase it a little bit every few days to avoid having diarrhea because it’s a disaster. If you’re a caregiver, and you give it to somebody with Alzheimer’s and they have diarrhea. That’s the last time Have you ever gotten?
CAVIN 30:02
Exactly No. So? Well, you know, I think that’s interesting. Also, with the whole, like, calories in calories out conversation. Yeah. Coconut oil, it just goes right through me. I didn’t absorb it. That is not calories in. But it’s interesting that the wisdom of the human body to be like, I can’t absorb all this stuff ago and just wants it out, you know? Yeah, yeah.
MARY 30:33
Yeah, the liver can compensate over time. And that’s why you increase it gradually, the liver can still make bile, it just doesn’t have that gallbladder to store it in if you’ve had a gallbladder removed. So it’s, I think that that’s a way of doing it. And you know, even Steve, you know, we started with smaller amounts in the beginning. And then around two months, started mixing MCT and coconut altogether, I literally put it in the same bottle. And use it me because it saves liquid at room temperature, I could put it on salad or in smoothies or whatever, you know, coconut oil, if you put it on anything cold, it chunks up right away. It took about four months to get up to the amount that we finally settled on. And he was taking a lot, he was taking three tablespoons for each meal of this mixture. And then two more tablespoons before bedtime, eventually, you know that it took months to get up to that point where he would tolerate it. And did you have a gallbladder? No. I mean, yes, yes, he did.
CAVIN 31:32
You don’t have a galbladder
MARY 31:34
was that I, you know, I don’t have any trouble. Now. You know, I also I just taking it more slowly and increase it. And I’ve been taking it ever since he started taking it because I have old timers on both sides of my family. I mean, I you know, have rationalized that if it would help somebody who actually has Alzheimer’s, it could potentially prevent it, you know, and I, I think, you know, for Steve, if we had caught it. I mean, if I had known about it, when he was diagnosed or earlier, when we knew that there was some problem going on, you know, we might be in a very different place now. Because he you know, he could have started it much sooner, much, much sooner. And there are people now that I’ve been in touch with that have had very long term success. It was a man in California, Joe, his wife, Carol there in a couple of my books. And Joe at four was doing all kinds of strange things and confused and not talking much. And he was diagnosed three different neurologists that he had Alzheimer’s in 2012. And his wife, a friend told her about the coconut and MCT oil. And she actually started writing to me at that point, his cases in my collection of case reports and He improved a lot just with coconut and MCT oil, and they already had a healthy Mediterranean kind of diet, but they did a little more, stringently, low glycemic, you know, diet, and 2016, when the ketone salts came along, he added that and he improved more. And in 2018, when the ketone Ester came out, he also added that, and they were already doing overnight fasting and and he improved more. And so the last two evaluations that he had, they said, Well, he has mild cognitive impairment, which precedes Alzheimer’s. So this was 10 years later that he now has, he’s not even at Alzheimer’s yet. And he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s by three neurologists at the time. And I did get to meet him he had way a great conversations. He was very up to date on politics and everything going on in the news and just a cheerful happy man. And he was 94. He had surgery, he had a pacemaker that he’d had for years, and the battery kind of pooped out and he had to have surgery. And he just was like he fell off a cliff and he ended up dying a couple of weeks later have heart failure related to his age. Before that he did not have Alzheimer’s. And I think he may be the first survivor of that they talked about all the commercials the first survivor still out there. No, it was
CAVIN 34:04
that are you familiar with Dale Bredesen?
MARY 34:07
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, he’s come around to the ketogenic diet. He first book, The End of Alzheimer’s. Well, I actually read he had a study that he published, I think it was in 2014 to 2014 or 2016. I believe it was 10 people that had Alzheimer’s that had approved with a regimen that he put them on a supplement regimen and on the list was coconut oil. And, and at the time, you know, my husband, you know, I also, you know, had him on certain supplements too. And he basically I checked off yeah, we’re doing that we’re doing that, you know, and the coconut oil and I thought at the time, I’m wonderful. It’s just the coconut oil. You can’t tell you know, you’re studying multiple things in the same study. But his first book, The End of Alzheimer’s, the first edition he basically suggested using MCT oil, but it was just a tiny amount. was like a half a teaspoon to MLS once a day until insulin resistance was overcome, then I thought, I’m really not going to quite do it, you know, but then, you know, he’s come around, you know, like his the second edition, there was much, much, much more about the keto diet, you know, throughout the book, you know, so I suspect that his own experience with his patients evolved. And, you know, he found that people that were doing a low carb higher fat diet that they were improving, and I did get to meet him at a book signing, we were next to each other. And I told him about, you know, all about the coconut oil and all of that. And he in his second edition, he actually did include a little story, a little bit about us, you know, our story work, which was interesting. So, yeah, but I think he’s on the right track with the whole thing about that there’s only one cause of Alzheimer’s. No, I believe there’s many causes. And both dramatic brain injury for example, people get plaques and tangles, and that part of the brain, you know, where the brain is injured, just it would just what happens in Alzheimer’s socks, and you know, and there are hundreds of studies of microbes micro organisms that may cause or contribute to Alzheimer’s disease. Herpes simplex is, has had several 100 studies now that, you know, causes fever blisters on the mouth, and other places. But you know, the mouth did nerves that it lives in, in between outbreaks, has its roots in the same area of the brain where Alzheimer’s starts. And when somebody gets Herpes Simplex encephalitis, it travels in the same pathway that Alzheimer’s travels through the brain. So there’s a lot of study, you know, of herpes simplex. And yeah, and one of the cool things about coconut oil is it has half of the fattest, lauric acid, C 12, which is, it’s kind of between a medium chain and long chain fatty acid and the way it behaves. But you know, it’s often considered a medium chain fatty acid, but it’s highly antimicrobial, that kills all kinds of viruses, including herpes simplex, it kills the dental pathogens, they talk about bacteria in the mouth, possibly being responsible for Alzheimer’s, people may have heard that, that kills all kinds of bacteria. It kills chlamydia, which is another possible cause of Alzheimer’s, Lyme disease. It’s a spiral Keet. And Syphilis is a spiral Keith are in the same family simply as well known to cause dementia if it’s not treated. And there’s a lot of work out there with Lyme disease. Now, there are people that have symptoms exactly like Alzheimer’s, they get treated for Lyme disease, and they completely recover within and they get treated with an antibiotic. So some of these cases of Alzheimer’s may be treatable, they may be a simple treatment, like an antibiotic might be able to overcome it. And the thing with the coconut oil, you know, I really felt strongly that my husband had that Herpes Simplex was his problem that that is what basically set it off. He had constant fever blisters, and he, you know, they come late last seven or 10 days and go away for a week or two and come back and over and over and over. And when he was 29, he had an infection around his eye blisters all around his eye. And he was extremely sick. I mean, he might even have had mild herpes encephalitis at that point. But after we started that coconut oil, he, you know, in the next, let’s see how many years was that eight years, he had four tiny fever blisters during that whole time, it usually happened when he had a cold, you know, so I felt like the coconut or the lauric acid was likely controlling that a lot of the time. So that’s, you know, some other factors that people might be interested in, you know, that there could be some kind of infection. And I mean, that then that’s one thing, like Bredesen, when he evaluates people, you know, he does evaluate for infections and they look at molds, different molds stuff can potentially get in the brain, Aspergillus and other other fungus Candida, you know, that type of thing. And, you know, just consider many different possibilities. Air pollution can be a big problem, heavy metals and air pollution. So I yeah, by the book that I flashed earlier, I’m gonna flash it again.
CAVIN 39:11
Yeah! Forward by Dr. Dom D’Agostino too!
MARY 39:14
Yes, he wrote the foreword. Yes, yes. That, yeah. It’s called Clearly Keto for Healthy Brain Aging and Alzheimer’s Prevention. And it’s my fourth book. And this, you know, the first part of the book cons focuses on the problem of diabetes of the brain and diabetes in general. It’s a huge risk factor for Alzheimer’s. If you have diabetes, you have a 30% risk of developing dementia. And the average population is about 5%. So it’s a much greater risk of diabetes and Eric Westman, Dr. Eric Westman at Duke University, you might want to do a podcast with him. He has been using the Atkins diet, you know basically very low carb higher fat diet. for his patients with type two diabetes for decades, a couple of decades now 2025 years, and he’s helped more than 4000 people with diabetes, get off their medications, and even off insulin, type two diabetes, you know, go into remission their numbers drastically, I mean, they normalize, so fasting, blood sugar, hemoglobin, even C can all go back to normal. And as long as they stay on the diet, they can keep their diabetes completely under control and remission. You know, basically, there are ways Reversing Diabetes is very important. But, you know, basically, I talked about the benefits of a Mediterranean keto diet, you know, for healthy brain aging, and for Alzheimer’s. But then, you know, in the next part of the book, I talk about many different other things that people can do that are risk factors for Alzheimer’s. If you make certain lifestyle choices, you might be able to delay it or prevented altogether and, you know, like, some of them include getting adequate sleep, the studies are showing that between seven to eight hours of sleep is good, not too little and not too much. Treating sleep apnea that’s a known cause of dementia is untreated sleep apnea, or your brain loose, the yolk is deprived of oxygen, like frequently during the night when you have sleep apnea. controlling blood pressure is very important. And then there are certain foods to avoid, like trans fats, you know, unfortunately, they’ve been mostly banned in the US. So there is hydrogenated fats aren’t. They’re not completely fish, right? There’s not really less than a half a gram or
CAVIN 41:34
so they have to say there’s any if it’s less than half a gram, right? And they don’t make the serving size, whatever they want. Right? Yeah.
MARY 41:43
Yeah. Yeah. And then there’s another thing Dr. Suzanne, Delmonte she’s, she’s the one who first coined the term type three diabetes and the studies for diabetes of the brain back in 2005 2008. She also did work with nitrosamine compounds, and showing that they cause brain insulin resistance. These were in animals, by some nitrosamine compounds are things like sodium nitrate, and nitrites that are in that they use them in meats to keep them looking red. And, you know, so it’s been a lot of processed foods, bacon, it’s in scotch. A lot of Scotch has nitrosamines. And it’s in all white flour. The Add a vitamin, a synthetic vitamin called by Amin, mono nitrate, because thymine is it’s completely removed when they refine the flour. And people were getting very, very, when they first introduced white flour, you know, without having fortification, you know, with Vitamina. And then they added it but as a synthetic called thymine, mono nitrate. And I can only find one mouse study for six weeks of the safety of thiamine mononitrate. But it’s a nitrosamine compound. And, you know, I communicated a little bit back and forth with Dr. Del Monte about this. And I said, Could this vitamin be a problem? And she said, Well, I keep my family away from it. And every good people, like some people, every meal and snack, they have something with white power in it.
CAVIN 43:18
So let me just clarify, he said thiamin mononitrate is a synthetic form of thymine when we made one, right that they put in to all white flowers. And white rice. Why we white rice? Okay. Yeah, even white rice even like Jeff Rose.
MARY 43:41
Yeah, because they Yeah, yeah, so all white rice, they have to add it, you know, it’s required that they have to add thymine to it and it’s almost always a stymied. mononitrate there’s another compound by mean fluoride that’s probably a hydrochloride that’s probably okay. But find me mono nitrate, I got really I kind of went down rabbit holes find study it. And I found that it’s partly fat soluble at body temperature. So it can be stored in fat. And usually by amine is a water soluble vitamin, it would just be flushed out if you didn’t use it, you know. So over time, it can be stored potentially, and in the liver nitrosamine compounds are converted to toxic Sara minds that then can cause insulin resistance in the brain. So
CAVIN 44:31
one safety study that you could take
MARY 44:33
that was all I could find one safety study in mice, you know, way back. I mean, I started doing this in the 1940s really started eating all the white flour, all the white flour. Yeah. And it’s in so many other you know, foods, processed foods that add vitamins, infant, I found an infant formula that has it I found a lot of infant foods that had it Jr foods and that type of thing. And you know, so now I’m here It just kind of supports the idea of a whole food diet, you know, we’re eating whole grains, you know, because you will get the timing that you need from the whole brain, but it will be in the natural form that your body will recognize and be able to use.
CAVIN 45:13
Interesting. Yeah, for digestion. Sometimes I recommend why, you know, why white rice? Because of like, you know, the difficulty breaking down the house in the phytates found in that, but Whoa, yeah. Okay. All right. Looking at the package, like it does say it on the ingredients are the
MARY 45:38
Light Beyond the ingredients, if you look under the white flour, it may be in there, or it might just have thymine percent of daily requirement that it meets or something like that. But that you might, I’m trying to think of I’ve looked, I haven’t really looked lately, that was quite a while back that I started became aware of
CAVIN 45:56
you said, thiamine, something chloride
MARY 46:00
hydrochloride. Okay, because that’s a more valuable kind of substance with lead.
CAVIN 46:07
So how would how would we know that one? Right. I don’t want my wife my white race.
MARY 46:16
Yeah, yeah. I have it. Like if I have sushi, but that’s maybe every three months, you know, I’ll have some white rose. And that’s not very much. But other than that, I eat whole grains. And that’s the main reason you know why, then, you know, I stay away from wheat, too, because it’s so high in gluten, you know, gluten can, you know, cause leaky gut, which can cause inflammation. I think you had leaked about leaky gut nearby. Yeah,
CAVIN 46:43
yeah. But the other thing about wheat is most of the we all wheat that is inorganic, is washed with glyphosate in order to get it to death state at the same time. So they had a larger crop yield. Yeah. So now, it has glyphosate, which is shown in every study ever to be terrible for human health and carcinogenic. Yeah,
MARY 47:08
I’m gonna shamelessly plug my, this is a third edition of my first book, chamber. You’ll be getting a copy. We have a whole section about glyphosate and
CAVIN 47:21
What is it called for the listeners?
MARY 47:23
called Alzheimer’s disease. What if there was a cure the story of ketones. So the first edition was written in 2011. And the second was published in 2013. And it’s, you know, it starts the first sort of it has my husband story, you know, what happened and quite a bit of detail, and I got to finish his story, which was good, because it was not finished at that point. And I couldn’t even talk about the ketone ester. And the other two, you know, well, he hadn’t really started it yet, you know, for the first edition when it was finis hed, but I had a good chance to greatly update the science. So much has happened in the last 10 years. There’s so much research out there now. And the ketone esters, and the salts are out, they weren’t then and I talk a lot of detail about that, how to use them. You know, basically all my books, though, the last three, including this one had quite a bit of information about using exogenous ketones to and monitoring ketones and some of the potential problems with taking exogenous ketones. Well, for example, the somebody with diabetes needs to know that your blood sugar is going to drop, almost certainly, if you take ketone salts are a ketone ester is going to drop, it could be 15, or 20 points just for the small dose, you know, like milligrams per deciliter. And if you’re taking medications or insulin, and your blood sugar drops, more than you expect it to, that could be a problem. So people need to, you know, basically monitor their blood sugar closely, that’s what I encourage, I will say don’t use it as a monitor, it could actually be very beneficial for somebody that has diabetes and controlling their blood sugar, but they need to, you know, kind of work with their doctor to potentially drop the dose into their medication or insulin, you know, when they’re taking this. So that’s just an example. And then, but the salts, you know, there are many different products out there, and some are only sodium beta hydroxy butyrate. And if you take a couple servings of ballet, it’s a huge amount of sodium that you’re taking in on top of what you eat in your diet. So the balanced you know, that his sodium, potassium, calcium, magnesium is really a good balance, because we need all those minerals, you know, we need to get the all of those minerals, but we don’t want to you know, if you take too much potassium and you’re taking a potassium supplement, because you’re on diuretics or something that could be a big problem. So people just need to be aware of that type of thing. And before they just kind of jump into it and start taking a couple servings a day.
CAVIN 49:55
Yeah, absolutely. Where can people learn more about you, Mary?
MARY 50:00
Ah, well, I have a website, that’s probably a good place to start. It’s coconutketones.com. Let’s see coconutketones.com and prepare this website up since late 2008. It has tons of information, free printable information, my books are on there links to my books, and I do have links to various supplements on there. You know, people always ask, Where can I get this. So I have links to the supplements, and I have recommended books on there, I’ll have to add your book to it.
CAVIN 50:32
How many books have you published.
MARY 50:37
So I’ve had, well, this will be the third edition of my first book. And then I have another book. Actually, my first book looks like, okay, and that’s, that’s not me and my husband on there. I’m sure people say that doesn’t? Well, that’s because it’s not me, my publisher, what a picture of me and my husband, he wanted a picture of this. This couple that apparently he liked better, I don’t know. And then, you know, the book, the first book was had Steve story, and then it had so much science. And some people didn’t quite get to the part where it taught you how to put coconut and MCT onto your diet. So then I wrote this second book is sort of a companion. It’s called coconut solution for Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s and other diseases. And it starts right up front with how to add the oils to the diet, and then discusses why a lower carb diet is a good idea and how to do that. And there’s a whole food. I don’t think I called it Mediterranean or not too much in here. But it was a whole food diet. It was based on a Mediterranean diet and a whole lot of recipes in there. And for some reason this book’s been pretty popular.
CAVIN 51:48
Yeah, yeah. And then I have a copy of that. Awesome. Yeah.
MARY 51:54
I have back here. I just got.
CAVIN 51:58
Yeah.
MARY 52:00
But this is the complete book of ketones and, and this one came out in 2019. And I just wanted to more broadly, look at the therapeutic benefits of ketones. So I interviewed Dominic D’Agostino, and the pioneers of ketone research Dr. Beech who’s passed away in 2020. And Dr. Theodore van Italy, wrote the foreword to this book. He was 99 when he wrote the foreword, and he’s one of the doctors that discovered that MCT oil is converted to ketones. And he was extremely interested in ketones as therapeutics. And so he wrote that, the foreword to my book and I have patients who improved I have doctors who are practicing dieticians, Miriam Clayman, and best to pick cania are interviewed in this book. And then, and all the how tos of you know, talking about the spectrum of the ketogenic diet. It’s not just one diet, it’s not just all bacon and meat, like some people it is, and bacon and eggs, you know, it doesn’t have to be any meat. You know, almost any diet can be adapted to a ketogenic diet. It’s just really how much fat versus carbohydrate that you eat in the diet. So I teach people how to kind of plan their own diet. I have charts for figuring out you know, how much macronutrient to put in your diet
CAVIN 53:21
It was funny it is the first time I spoke at Ketocon is like, you know, keto diet is an interesting term, like, ketones are a substrate kind of like glucose is a substrate. We don’t talk about the glucose diet do we? It’s ketogenic metabolism. It’s ketone metabolism, which is so broad, you know, there’s so many ways in which to do this sort of metabolism, like following THE keto diet makes it a diet, but this is it’s way more broad than that.
MARY 54:03
Yes. It’s very broad, very broad.
CAVIN 54:05
so like you said, it can be adapted to anything, you know, yeah, ketoterian: the vegetarian version of the ketogenic diet, right?
MARY 54:15
Yeah, even vegan meat. It’s, I think it’s tougher for people who are vegan. Yeah. Because you mainly rely on lagoons and that type of thing, which tend to be high in carbs, but they’re very high in flavor too. And it’s just a matter of including enough fat in the diet to balance the carbohydrates. But it’s so it is possible, but they’re, you know, other issues too. There’s no b 12 and vegetables. So you have to get there certain supplements that you really have to get from from supplements, you know, basically to be you know, healthy and, you know, maintain your nutrition adequately, but it is still possible and there can even be a junk food ketogenic diet, but that’s a really bad idea.
CAVIN 54:55
Yeah, yeah. The junk food Yeah. The Keto garbage. I’d go to these conferences, Paleo FX and like Ketocon and things like that. And I come home with a whole bag of paleo junk food or keto junk food and would be so much garbage. But like
MARY 55:18
a lot of it. I mean, it doesn’t taste very good. It doesn’t taste natural. It doesn’t taste like real food. And, you know, a lot of it is pretty bad. Yeah.
CAVIN 55:28
But that being said, I’m, I’m happy to be making alternatives for people that are relying on us and use it not as a substitute to just like drop into but rather a stepping stone to get you to a healthier diet.
MARY 55:44
Right, right. Yeah. And people, you know that sugar addiction is so strong and just wanting something sweet is very powerful. And it’s the same thing. I think one conference, I counted 40 different exhibits that had some kind of sweet food that had MCT oil in it. So, yeah, so it’s an interesting phenomenon that’s sprung out of it, but that everything else is good. And maybe you have that for a snack, then yeah, that should be okay.
CAVIN 56:16
On Yeah, it’s a treat, treat it like a treat for Exactly, exactly. Mary it’s been so good to have you on. And I’m so happy to meet you and to speak with you. And yeah, we’ll be in touch. Maybe we can get together at some point.
MARY 56:38
be really cool. That’d be really cool. In fact, I think metabolic health summit is going to be more in Clearwater, so I’ll be there. Yeah. And we live close. So we have no excuse not to go. Definitely no matter where it is that we’d go to that conference.
CAVIN 56:53
Yes. Definitely. Well, thank you so much and thank all of you for sticking around. We’ll see you next time.
Leave a Reply
Your email is safe with us.