How extra virgin olive oil protects against Alzheimer's

How extra virgin olive oil protects against Alzheimer's


(NaturalNews) According to the National Institutes of Health
(NIH), Alzheimer's disease (AD) -- which robs people of the ability to
think, remember and reason -- is an irreversible, progressive disease
that eventually destroys even the ability to carry out the simplest
tasks. The NIH predicts that as many as 5.1 million Americans may have
Alzheimer's disease. There's no cure and no treatment that works for
long.

But does that mean there's no hope you can stave off AD in
the first place? So far, Big Pharma has nothing that works but
researchers working on natural approaches are making progress. The
latest is from a team of scientists in the Department of Basic
Pharmaceutical Science at the University of Louisiana at Monroe. They say consuming extra virgin olive oil helps reduce the risk of Alzheimer's -- and they think they know why.

In their new study, just published in the American Chemical Society (ACS) journal ACS Chemical Neuroscience,
they conclude that a component of olive oil helps shuttle abnormal
proteins associated with AD out of the brain. Amal Kaddoumi and
colleagues explained that the prevalence of Alzheimer's has long been
known to be lower in Mediterranean countries and, in the past, this has
been attributed to the high concentration of healthful monounsaturated
fats in olive oil which is a big part of the Mediterranean diet.
However, more recent studies have suggested that the actual protective
agent might be a natural substance in olive oil called oleocanthal that protects nerve cells from the kind of damage that occurs in AD.

Kaddoumi's
team set out to investigate whether oleocanthal actually helps decrease
the accumulation in the brain of beta-amyloid, which is believed to be
the culprit behind the mind-destroying properties of AD. For their
study, they tracked the impact of oleocanthal in the brains and cultured
brain cells of laboratory mice (a strain of rodents bred to use as
stand-ins for humans with Alzheimer's disease).

The results? Oleocanthal was clearly effective.
In every case, it showed a consistent pattern of it boosting the
production of two proteins and key enzymes believed to be critical in
ridding beta-amyloid from the brain.

"Extra-virgin olive
oil-derived oleocanthal associated with the consumption of the
Mediterranean diet has the potential to reduce the risk of AD or related
neurodegenerative dementias," the report concludes.

As Natural News has also reported previously, scientists are finding that olive oil
contains natural health-protective components that may be effective
against many serious diseases. For example, researchers from the Catalonian Institute of Oncology (ICO) in Girona and the University of Granada
in Spain discovered that extra virgin olive oil's polyphenols have
bioactivity against breast cancer cell lines. And in a review of olive
oil research published in the journal Critical Reviews in Food Science and Nutrition, scientists from Deakin University in
Victoria, Australia, concluded the health benefits of the Mediterranean
diet (which include a lower incidence of cardiovascular disease and
atherosclerosis as well as several types of cancers) could be attributed
to the regular consumption of virgin olive oil by Mediterranean
populations.

Source:-
http://www.naturalnews.com/039730_olive_oil_Alzheimers_disease_research.html