Waist Fat Doubles Dementia Risk In Women | Hacker News Reader

Waist Fat Doubles Dementia Risk In Women

futurepundit.com

13 pointscwan5 comments

I speculate that the dementia is caused by poor circulation of oxygen to the brain. This would be due to arterial plaque and inflammation caused by the sympathetic stress response and LDL build-up which follow excess consumption of carbohydrates. The carbs account also for metabolic syndrome and the accumulation of body fat. (Fructose is principally responsible for the fatty liver.) Excess consumption of carbs is an addiction. All addictions are caused by identification with the thinking (verbal) mind, which is centred in the dominant hemisphere; they represent a misguided attempt to escape from that personality. Carbs are the most common addiction partly because avoiding them is difficult both socially and financially, and, obviously, avoiding food completely is difficult biologically.

It may well sound arrogant and/or downright wacky to state all this speculation but, hey, it represents an attempt to explain the world which is really what those scientists ought to be doing before they design an experiment!

A few details are a little off, but mostly correct. Excess consumption of carbohydrates does not cause a sympathetic stress response. Cortisol (the primary adrenal stess hormone) is actually stimulated by hypo-glycemia.

The carbs do account for metabolic syndrome (a somewhat out-of-fashion term for the prelude to type 2 diabetes mellitus). The carbs do account for excess body fat. There are a lot of causes of fatty liver. Fructose is a particular problem because it bypasses the pancreas's natural insulin response, which collaborates with grehlin and other hormones to induce satiety. Better to simply say fructose, more than other carbs, contributes to the obesity problem.

As for the addiction issue . . . there's some evidence that carbs actually lower serum dopamine concentration, though regional concentrations in the brain may vary differently, and are likely more important. Dopamine usually spikes after satisfying and addictive urge. So addiction is probably not the right analogy.

I alluded to what I believe is a better model in the first paragraph: fructose eludes the satiety response. So you become hungry at the sight of food (the cephalic phase of gustation), and even though you eventually become satieted, the calories derived from fructose didn't contribute to the natural negative feedback relationship.

Here's a somewhat simplified feedback diagram I made on the issue, which reflects the review and feedback of Dr Todd Berstain at University of Iowa http://nielsolson.us/Haversian/2006/12/nutritional_model.htm...

The movie King Corn does a good job of explaining the economics (http://www.kingcorn.net/), and it just so happens that the corn breeds we have lead to a lot of fructose.

If you plot obesity rate over time from 1900 to now, I think you'll see a significant change in the US obesity curve around the time Earl Butz, Nixon's Secretary of Agriculture, changed the focus of farm policy toward corporate monoculture.

Thanks for the criticism! I take your point about fructose and appetite.

My reason for believing that carbs stimulate the sympathetic nervous system is that I think that, paradoxically, excitement and stress are essentially the same thing. (Excitement initially feels better because thoughts are stimulated and negative emotions are numbed, along with the rest of the body.) Whatever, when it comes to blood sugar, hyper is followed by hypo, so you can get cortisol that way.

I doubt that looking at neurotransmitters is the right way to think about addiction. It is a mental phenomenon which operates on a different level of abstraction. To use an analogy from computing, explaining a software bug does not in general require looking at hardware.

Until we have good explanation of addiction, we can't meaningfully test related theories. So it's hard to take seriously what medical science currently regards as evidence in this matter. However, the fact that AA uses a 'spiritual' programme to break addiction, and that some addicts claim to have been helped by mystical experiences brought on by hallucinogens -- these do seem like significant pointers.

More basically, people commonly report being in two minds about food, which is the hallmark of addiction.

Not surprisingly, after more digging, the jury is still out on fMRI evidence for dopamine, addiction, food, and cravings.

http://www.jci.org/articles/view/18533/version/1

http://www.ohsu.edu/nod/2007-04-25.shtml

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi...

Or it could be that all these women are just sick and tired of hearing and seeing skinny supermodels.

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