A Dirty Gene and a Ketogenic Diet

What’s the connection between the APOE4 allele and Alzheimer’s disease?

The APOE4 allele is linked to an increased risk of Alzheimer’s disease, but you don’t have to let genes determine your destiny. Find out what diet and lifestyle changes can lead to cognitive longevity.

The APOE4 gene, #Alzheimers and what you can do about it. #genes #ketodiet @drbenlynch

Dirty gene of the month, APOE4. Why? Heavily, heavily researched. APOE4 is heavily researched and heavily associated with Alzheimer’s. Why is this heavily associated with Alzheimer’s? What does APOE4 do anyway and what happens when it gets dirty? How does it get dirty, and when it gets dirty what do you do to clean it up? Because, man, if you’re born with APOE4 and many of us are, then that’s not a death sentence. It is showing that you’re increasing your susceptibility to Alzheimer’s. But it’s absolutely not your destiny. My goal for you today is to say, “Hey if you have APOE4, you know how to take action to it.” Alright? Let’s go to it right now.

What does APOE4 do? You can’t fix something if you don’t know what it does, right? Let’s first slow down and say, “How do I fix it?” Well you first have to know what it does. APOE4 simply helps bind, transport, and break down fat in your liver and in your brain. If you can’t break down fat in your live and you can’t transport it, what’s going to happen? Your blood cholesterol is going to go up. Your triglycerides are going to go up. Your doctor is going to see that and they’re going to put you on a statin. But if the problem is APOE4, is that what you want to do? Is that the fix? No, you do not have a statin deficiency. Mark my words.

Now, your brain is a big ball of fat. You have to be transporting fat around in your brain and you have to be breaking certain other fats down so you can make way for repairing and bringing in new healthy fats. That is what APOE4 does. It’s basically your fat truck.

What happens if APOE4 doesn’t work? A whole slew of things. This graphical illustration taken from this research paper right here and I’ll put the link below in my description for you so you can click that. This is a full free paper. It’s phenomenal. It’s a great one. In short if APOE4 doesn’t work, your brain don’t work. Alzheimer’s is associated with diabetes type 3. Diabetes type is basically you cannot utilize glucose. If you cannot use utilize glucose in your brain, then what can you use?

What’s really, really popular right now? It starts with K. Ketogenic diet may be something to consider. Hold on to that thought. All these things are going on if your APOE4 gene is not working right. Brain inflammation, can’t use glucose. Your brain is getting smaller. You’re getting amyloid-beta plaques. All the known factors for Alzheimer’s.

How do you know if APOE4 is dirty or not? You do a genetic test. You talk to your doctor. You can do a specific APOE4 test if you want, or you can go to 23andMe or you can go to possibly Genos Research or other companies to test for your APOE status. If you go to 23andMe, at least when I did it years ago, there was a little box there and there was an APOE that said, “Do you want to check this? Is your APOE4 status?” and I said yes. It said you have to check this box to understand that we’re not at risk because it’s a very significant gene. It’s scary. If you’re APOE4,4 as this individual is, it’s scary.

But keep in mind that it’s a gene. That’s it. You are in control of your destiny and you are in control of how your genes function overall. This shows susceptibility. This empowers you to make lifestyle choices that are for the better. If you do not know that you have the APOE4,4 variant and you lead a life of playing football, getting concussions, having a high-fat, high-sugar, high-carb diet, stressed out, not sleeping very well, then you are on your way to getting Alzheimer’s early. But if you find out that you have the APOE4,4 variant and you get the information which I’m sharing with you right now, you can take action right now to reduce your risk of Alzheimer’s.

How common is this gene in Alzheimer’s? It’s pretty significant. APOE4, 4 is found in 91 percent in this study right here. Ninety-one percent of individuals in this study had the APOE4,4 variant and had Alzheimer’s. So 91 percent of the individuals in this study had the APOE4,4 variant and Alzheimer’s. They did not have APOE4,4 variant most the time if they had late onset of Alzheimer’s. If you don’t have the APOE4,4 variant, you can get Alzheimer’s much, much later 84 years old or so. If you do have APOE4,4 variant, your risk of getting Alzheimer’s a lot earlier, say 68 years old, is dramatically increased.

Oh god, that’s bad, right? Yes but susceptibility. These individuals, how was their lifestyle? What did they eat? What did they do? What was their job? Did they get head injuries? So don’t look at this and say, “Woe is me. I’m screwed. I have a 91 percent chance of winning this bad lottery ticket.” Absolutely not.

The solution for supporting APOE4 is following a healthy lifestyle. It’s that simple. Well, kind of. Leading a healthy lifestyle in this day and age isn’t easy. Why? Because inflammation is everywhere. You get inflamed from chemicals in the environment. You get inflamed from infections. You get inflamed from the bad foods that you eat. You get inflamed from not sleeping very well, and you can inflamed from the medications that you’re on. You also get inflamed from the supplements that you’re taking. There’s a lot of ways to get inflammation. So you want to evaluate inflammation and get it in check. HSCRP is a great way to check. SED rates, there’s various labs to look for inflammation. Talk with your doctor about it.

Infections. Infections are everywhere. Super bugs are everywhere look for them. You have to identify infections because they feed the inflammation. Environment. The environment is toxic. It’s chemical. It’s GMOs. It’s pesticides. It’s herbicides. It’s toxic polluted air which you’re breathing every day all day. So you have to make sure that you have doing the best you can to clean your environment.

Head injuries big one. If you have the APOE4,4 variant or your child or your grandson or you know somebody who has APOE4,4 variant, they cannot—I repeat—cannot get into sports that are susceptible to head injuries. Football is a big one. Soccer is another one. There’s a lot of them. Look at this. Soccer you can use head helmets as well and maybe not be in the position of getting so many headers. I’m a big soccer fan, so hey, do what you can.

Diet and nutrition, huge. Standard American diet is extremely what? Inflammatory. If you’re eating a crappy diet, you’re more prone to infections because your immune system can’t work very well. Very, very important.

Sleep. Massive, massively important. I’m going to show you here how important that is in a second.

Stress. Stress is huge. We’re all busy. You’re taking the time to watch this, so that’s awesome. But stress needs to be nipped in the bud. Seriously. Find ways to combat it. If you’re watching the news that makes you stressed out, stop watching the news. I don’t watch the news. The world’s not going to end because I’m not watching the news. My world is actually going to be better because I’m not watching the news.

Sleep is linked. There are many, many papers now. Researchers are jumping on this because Alzheimer’s comes when? When you get older. What happens to your sleep when you get older? It goes down. So if your sleep goes down, your brain can’t heal. During the evening when you are sleeping, it’s the time for your brain to defrag. You know when you go to your computer and you clean up a hard drive defragment. That happens at night. You can set your computer to that. If it doesn’t, the performance in your computer goes down. Same thing in your computer up here. Let it defrag. Sleep well. Thank you, Alessandro Ferretti for enlightening me with this information because this is absolutely key.

What is this on my finger? It’s the oura ring. The oura ring is tracking my sleep. Since I started understanding the importance of sleep and what I was doing in my lifestyle, I made changes to better my sleep. Actually last night was the best sleep I’ve ever had since I’ve been tracking for nearly a year to this day. Pretty huge.

If you want to support further with nutrition, you need to be looking at certain compounds to facilitate the health of your brain. PQQ is in phenomenal antioxidant. It’s basically the most potent antioxidant that is known out there currently. This thing can bind and regenerate itself multiple times. It’s the most potent antioxidant out there. Vitamin C can only regenerate about four times. This thing can recycle 20,000 times. It binds a free radical and it can do it twenty thousand times before it’s spent. Vitamin C only about four. PQQ is amazing. The research is amazing check it out.

Glutathione. There is a lot of research that is equating low glutathione levels and high lipid peroxidation in individuals with Alzheimer’s or dementia. Glutathione is a master antioxidant and it’s key to reducing the stress in your brain. Yes, stress produces a compound called a hydrogen peroxide which glutathione neutralizes.

These are useful compounds. But diet, nutrition, lifestyle, environment are absolutely critical. I also believe that a ketogenic diet is a phenomenal way not just to stay healthy and keep fit but to keep your brain fit and to reduce your risk for Alzheimer’s because APOE4, 4 variant is out there. You might have it. I have the 3,4 variant. Individuals in my family have the 4,4 variant so this is very dear to my heart. The ketogenic diet is something to seriously consider.

If you want to know more to see if the ketogenic diet is going to be useful for you, I’ve made a free assessment for you which you can take right now because the ketogenic diet can keep your APOE4 clean and preventing it from getting dirty. To learn how to take the assessment, see if the ketogenic diet is right for you, go here. Take a couple of seconds. Fill that sucker out and get on your way to keep your APOE4 clean. Thank you.