The Alzheimer’s Antidote With Amy Berger

Perfectly Healthy And Toned Radio ( Darren McDuffie- Host)
The Alzheimer’s Antidote
With
Amy Berger

Darren: Amy Berger, welcome to Perfectly Healthy and Toned Radio. How are you tonight?
Amy: I am good, thanks for having me.
Darren: Thanks for being on. As I said, you are my first show after a very, very long hiatus so, hopefully, I am not as rusty as I thought I would be but I have been doing this for a while so it should come pretty easy for me. But, normally what I do Amy, is when I have someone on the show, I ask them about their background and I know that you are from the military. So how does someone from the military get into Nutrition? Tell us about that.
Amy: Oh well, I was only in the military for 4 years so it wasn’t a career. I was in the Air Force. I was a (Korean ) linguist, airborne linguist if anyone out there is familiar with that particular job and the military lifestyle was not really for me. I am very proud to have served but at the moment, the best thing that came out of it was that I got to use my GI (bill 3.19) from my Masters in Nutrition, so it wasn’t a total wash and how did I get into Nutrition? It’s completely unrelated to my military career.
I grew up as a chubby kid and I was a chubby young adult. As a kid, I was the classic couch potato. I was never without a book, you know, I just liked to sit and read. As I got older though, that changed. I got a lot more active and I started running and I have run 2 marathons and despite changing my activity and paying attention to my diet, I was still chubby! And you know, I worked so hard to lose weight and it just never went anywhere. And I would watch people that exercised much less than I did and ate much worse than I did and they were thin and they were slender and I just spent a long, long time beating myself up, feeling guilty and feeling like a failure. And you know, finally, I just put two and two together and said what is wrong here?! Something isn’t working the way it’s supposed to and I stumbled into the world of low carb eating and my first introduction to it was Dr Atkinson’s book, the 1992 version of his new diet revolution and I haven’t looked back. It made sense. It made total sense to me why I wasn’t losing weight despite eating a lot of low fat foods, all those healthy whole grains, ah well, not so healthy, but at the time I thought they were and reading that book gave me the courage to eat a lot more fat and the scary fat, even the butter and the bacon and that’s when the weight went away. So my introduction to Nutrition and Health came from weight loss but over the years, it’s morphed into so much more than that. Now, I am a professional Nutritionist that tries to help other people with this but not just weight loss. I mean, obviously, we are talking about Alzheimer today but anything really, related to elevated insulin whether it is PCOS, or type 2 diabetes or heart disease or you know even skin tags, like there are so many things related to this that we don’t even realize and so, actually, losing weight is kind of like the least of these issues, so yeah, over time, I just started researching more about why and how this way of eating works and it just, it just makes sense.
Darren: Yeah. It’s always been a saying of mine fix your health problems and the weight will come off and most people end up trying to lose weight and they never really end up fixing their health problems but tonight we are discussing your book the Alzheimer Antidote and this is very near to me because I have lost, at least, 3 family members from this disease.

Most recently, I lost an uncle in July of last year to dementia. He had been suffering for a long time and you know you really hate to see someone pass away but sometimes it’s the best for them to, if that makes sense, because you see them in all their suffering and I can remember when his symptoms first set in. He lost a credit card and we were sitting in my mom’s dining room at the time, and I remember him arguing with his wife saying that why do you have my credit cards and he couldn’t understand why he was forgetting things and then it got progressively worse. But I guess my first question to you, in getting into the science of Alzheimer and really talking about the brain is, how does this actually start happening?
Amy: Good question. So, I don’t know if we know for sure, you know, with iron clad certainty, but what seems to be happening is , the cells in areas of the brain that get affected in this condition, lose the ability to get energy from glucose and to kind of explain that in plain English, the body can run on a lot of different fuels, whether that’s fat or carbohydrates or we don’t really like to run on protein but people may have heard, like the brain needs glucose, the brain has to get a certain amount of glucose and so imagine what happens when the brain’s ability to fuel itself from glucose is in jeopardy. And that’s basically what happens in this disease and over time, you know when somebody is younger like this it doesn’t happen overnight. Nobody wakes up all of a sudden with Alzheimer disease. It happens gradually, over a number of years and decades, but it starts happening in some people, as early as their 30s and 40s but at that time, when somebody is younger and healthier, their brain can compensate for this, so they don’t have any signs and symptoms. Their cognitive function, their brain function is normal and it’s only over time when the disease progresses to a point that they can’t compensate for it that you start seeing the memory loss, confusion and the personality changes. But really the major problem in this condition is that neurons, the special brain cells in the affected areas of the brain become unable to harness energy from glucose. So it’s basically a fuel crisis. It’s an energy crisis in the brain and as these brain cells are starved for fuel, they start to wither and they start to atrophy and die.
Darren: And I wanted to ask you this, because of the brain being the most energy demanding organ in the body, is that why the propensity for Alzheimer disease comes about?
Amy: That’s a really good question. It could be. We are not really sure why these cells, you know, undergo this change. What is making them stop being able to metabolize glucose so I don’t know that the fact that they require the most energy is why it’s happening but certainly because they need the most energy, when they don’t get enough energy, of course, it’s a huge problem.
Darren: Talking about insulin, because you mentioned that and a lot of people don’t understand insulin, my next question is leading to that. Because I remember, just researching from your book where you talk about enzyme affinity, is Alzheimer disease an enzyme affinity disease? Am I fair in saying that?
Amy: That’s a small part of it. I don’t think that’s the major factor but there is something going on there. Do you, I mean, do you want me to talk about insulin and…
Darren: Yeah. Talk about insulin and talk about why that happens because in really understanding that from the book, I understand that there is two parts of that, that you know, enzymes are looking to regulate insulin within the body but there is another part to that as well.
Amy: Ok. So I guess something I should have said earlier when we were talking about the glucose and this energy crisis, Alzheimer disease, is regularly referred to in the medical and scientific literature, as type 3 diabetes or diabetes of the brain.
So right off the bat, that tells us there is something going on with glucose and insulin coz if anyone out there listening knows about type 2 or type 1 diabetes, these are disorders of glucose regulation and insulin in the body. So one of the major, major risk factors for Alzheimer disease is chronic hyperinsulinemia and that’s just a big, fancy word that means your insulin levels are too high too much of the time. There is a lot of different things that contribute to that but the main result is that at least in Alzheimer disease, your brain doesn’t respond to insulin or glucose the way a healthy brain does. And the interesting thing about Alzheimer disease is that a lot of Alzheimer patients will have too much insulin in their body but not enough insulin in their brain. It’s almost as if there is a difference in the amount there. And insulin doesn’t control a 100% of what glucose does in the brain but it plays a roll and I guess we can talk about this enzyme called insulin degrading enzyme and the really fascinating thing about this enzyme is it’s exactly what it sounds like – insulin degrading enzyme.
Insulin is a hormone and after hormones do their job in our blood stream, they can’t just stay in the blood forever they have to be degraded and got rid of. So this enzyme, insulin degrading enzyme, goes after insulin and gets rid of it, but another target that this enzyme works on is something called beta amyloid proteins or just amyloid proteins. These amyloid proteins build up in the brains of people with Alzheimer disease and these proteins, as they accumulate and are not really cleared away well, they solidify and they form into something called plaques. These amyloid plaques are believed to be a causing factor in this disease. There is another school of thought that says (12.38), maybe we can talk about that. But the bottom line is: whether or not these plaques are causing dementia, they are definitely making it worse. They actually get in the way of the physical structures in the brain that help the brain cells communicate with each other. So it is really fascinating that this insulin degrading enzyme clears away these proteins before they have a chance to accumulate and form into these plaques. So people that have very high insulin levels all the time, this enzyme is too busy going after all the insulin thus leaving these amyloid proteins to accumulate. It’s almost like the enzyme is just occupied too much with dealing with all the insulin and so it doesn’t have time to go after these amyloid plaques.
Darren: Yeah. That’s what I meant by enzyme affinity disease. Going back to diabetes and understanding insulin and Alzheimer disease being actually called type 3 diabetes, if a person has type 1 or 2 diabetes, is this a precursor to having Alzheimer disease later on in life?
Amy: Really good question! I don’t think they have connected type 1 to Alzheimer’s but people with type 2 diabetes, do have an increased risk for dementia. But, this is probably some of the most important things I am going to say right here.

Type 2 diabetes is diagnosed only by looking at glucose. Only by looking at blood glucose in a fasting glucose test also called your blood sugar. Either looking at your fasting blood sugar, your hemoglobin A1C and what that is, is like 3 -4 month average of your blood sugar or your response to an oral glucose tolerance test which is where you like go to your doctor’s office or to a lab and they make you drink this really, really sickly sweet glucose solution and then they test your blood sugar at regular intervals to see how your body is responding to all that glucose.
The problem with the way the type 2 diabetes is diagnosed is that nobody is looking at insulin, they are only looking at glucose. And in many, many people, your blood glucose will be perfectly normal and even your A1C will be perfectly normal only because sky high insulin is keeping those things in check. And in Alzheimer’s and not just in type 2 diabetes but things like PCOS, (14.40) variance syndrome, hyper tension people who have skin tags, people who have gout, all of these conditions are related to high, high insulin regardless of your glucose level. And nobody is testing insulin.
Fasting insulin, in my opinion, should be a standard part of routine blood work and it is not. You have to specifically request it and I think a lot of chronic medical conditions these days, including Alzheimer’s are being missed when they could be caught years before people get really sick, if we were measuring insulin.
Darren: Going back to diabetes, when people think about diabetes, most of the time, especially type 2, we think about people who are overweight. But you don’t necessarily have to be overweight to have high insulin, am I correct in saying that?
Amy: Darren I want to come give you a hug because yes, oh my, you are exactly right and this is something that doesn’t get enough attention in the main stream media or even in the medical profession. No, you certainly do not have to be overweight to have type 2 diabetes, you don’t have to be overweight to have Alzheimer’s, of course there is a lot of elderly people with Alzheimer’s that are actually underweight. They don’t have enough meat on their bones but no, the thing about high insulin is that some people respond by becoming overweight. Their body sort of traps fuel, their body traps carbohydrate and fat. Some people don’t. Some people will experience a lot of other issues related to high insulin but through some stroke of luck, they just don’t get fat, they don’t accumulate a lot of extra weight so some of those people might have high blood pressure or like I said they might have gout, they might have erectile dysfunction, they might have, you know, low HDL, high triglycerides, liver problems. There is all kinds of other things that will show up in people of all shapes and sizes. This is like a personal issue to me because I used to be overweight and I know that you can be healthy and be carrying extra weight or you can be thin, you can look good on the outside and be very, very unhealthy on the inside.
Darren: A lot of people also are insulin resistant, so is this another precursor to having Alzheimer’s disease later on in life?

Amy: It absolutely is. In the research I have done anyway, you know, it’s very possible that I have missed something but chronically high insulin levels are actually, probably the strongest or maybe one of the strongest risk factors for Alzheimer’s disease. There is one genetic risk factor that we know of for sure, but other than that, the insulin resistance is to me, it’s like a smoking gun with Alzheimer’s.
Darren: Yeah. Getting into just talking more about the brain and how the brain uses energy. If the brain is using energy efficiently, how does that, I guess the word is, if the brain is using the energy inefficiently, how does that come about in stages? When do we actually start seeing the Alzheimer’s, because you mentioned earlier that it just doesn’t start happening. What is the first stage? Is that usually the memory loss? Because as I mentioned, my uncle, he started having just little things happen. I also had this with my grandmother like she couldn’t remember something, it was just the one thing and then it seemed as though it got progressively worse.
Amy: Yeah I think it manifests differently in different people. You know, all of us are going to have those quote unquote senior moments even somebody young and healthy ,every now and then is going to walk into a room and forget why they went in there, you are going to misplace your keys, it happens. It doesn’t mean you are on the road to dementia. Yeah. When you reach a certain age and it starts happening more often that’s kind of a warning sign. It’s just that it’s happening more often but other than that, you know, like I said it manifests differently. Some people find out like if their profession requires them to do a lot of math, they are not able to calculate things as easily off the top of their head, you know, some people will actually forget words. So it’s not just that they misplace things, or you know, oh I think I was supposed to be somewhere Thursday but I forgot. It’s kind of like you could look at an object and you don’t remember the name of it. You know you point to the mouse or your keyboard but you can’t remember the word mouse and you call it something else or you can’t remember the word at all so…there is a lot of different things that can happen. I think people know when it happens and they are just afraid to acknowledge and tell somebody about it when those things start happening more.
Darren: Yeah, you are making me think because sometimes I forget words but I think is because my brain is moving too fast! (Laughter) Coz sometimes I am like 4 or 5 steps ahead of myself and then the word just comes about. One thing that I am noticing as well Amy is people are beginning to be diagnosed younger with Alzheimer, used to be that people were 70/80 years old but now it seems as though people are in their 50s and 60s and they are being diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s. Why is that happening?
Amy: Yeah, that’s a very good point. I say, you know, they used to joke and call this old timers disease but it’s really not old timers any more coz you are exactly right, people are getting this much, much younger. So, part of it could be that, you know, people are living longer. Look at the baby boomer generation but then like you just said, we aren’t talking about older people, we are talking about people sort of in mid life. So I think that due to a lot of dietary factors we have had over the last couple of decades and some of the lifestyle issues too. These insulin resistance and disorders related to insulin resistance are much more common and they are affecting people at much younger ages. I mean, we don’t have what we used to call, adult onset diabetes anymore, we have type 2, because little kids get it now. Little kids get it, teenagers get it. We are not talking about type 1 that used to be called the juvenile onset, we are talking about type 2 and little kids get it. So, I think, assuming that Alzheimer is a disorder of insulin and glucose metabolism, it’s no wonder to me why it’s happening to people younger because now, you know, we have, really, the first couple of generations of people that have been raised on a very high carbohydrate diet. You know the generations that have been made to be afraid of natural animal fat, so, it’s a confluence of factors, I think, that are contributing to people getting it younger.
Darren: Yes that’s when I asked you that because I think, I grew up in the 70s, I don’t want to date myself but I am not afraid of my age, (laughter) but I grew up in the 70s and I can remember all of the dogma that came out about not eating fats because we had this whole low fat thing and everybody was scared of fat and that was probably early 70s and I was a child then and I remember how my grandmother switched to Wesson oil, my mom started using vegetable oils and all of that stuff…
Amy: Do you remember when McDonalds made their fries in beef tallow?
Darren: Yes and I remember.
Amy: Those were some tasty fries! (Laughing)
Darren: Yeah, those were the best fries. I also remember my grandmother used to keep a vat of bacon grease on the stove and that’s what she would make any of the time she fried anything, that’s what she would fry in but…
Amy: Yeah…
Darren: I guess my question is, do you think, because we kicked out butter, lard, tallow all these different things, that’s why we are experiencing what we are experiencing now? And you still have some people out there who vilify fat! I still see low fat in the grocery store, still see people who are afraid of fat.
Amy: Yeah, I think, it’s a combination of dietary factors. I think the number one issue is this, like, incredible overload of carbohydrate, you know, mostly sugar, mostly in the form of sugar and even just the refined grains. I shouldn’t say refined grains. It’s the whole grain too. Because when you look at the thing of whole grain bread, it’s still almost a 100% carbohydrate. When you take a whole, a hard red winter wheat berry and pulverize it into flour, that doesn’t even really need to be chewed, it will dissolve in your mouth, that’s refined. I don’t care how whole grain it is, you know. I don’t think its necessarily things like beans and potatoes and you know beets and parsnips and those kind of carbohydrates that are contributing to this but certainly the huge amount of refined grain and sugar that we are consuming these days and combine that with what you were saying about the dramatic change we have had in the composition of the fat in our diet, I think, as a population, you know, Americans have, we are eating a little bit less fat than we were, you know. I don’t think we cut back on fat to the extent the government wanted us to but nevertheless the kinds of fat we are eating now has changed so much.

That’s probably the most dramatic change that’s happened to our diet over the last 50 or 60 years, other than the amount of carbohydrate, is this change from more of the animal fats to the vegetable oils to things like corn oil, soy bean oil and (corn? 24.54) seed oil and those are very damaging because our cell membranes are made up of a lot of different types of fat and they can’t have too many of those kinds of fats in the cell membrane because they won’t work correctly. And if your cell membranes do not work correctly, nothing works correctly, not cellular communication, not your insulin receptors, your thyroid hormone receptors, I mean, anything that has to get through that cell membrane is going to have a problem. I think the brain is literally built out of cholesterol and out of fat and because it’s so fat heavy, in the brain, you know, if we are not getting the right types of fats it’s just a disaster, so it’s kind of like a double whammy triple whammy just multiple different dietary changes that have happened that are contributing to this.
Darren: Yeah. I wanted to get into that, this cell membrane, the neurons and mitochondria because that’s very important but before I do that, talking about fat, I guess when you talk about fat, the usual thing that goes along with that is cholesterol and again, most people are scared of fat because they are scared of cholesterol but cholesterol is a good thing for the brain is it not?
Amy: It’s like the best thing for the brain. Cholesterol has got such a bad rap it’s insane. It is the single most misunderstood and wrongfully accused, like, compound in probably the whole of medical history. Like I said, the brain is built largely out of cholesterol, I mean, you cannot have healthy cognitive function and a healthy brain without cholesterol just period, end of story. So it’s no surprise that people on statin drugs, you know statins are cholesterol lowering medications, if you go on the FDAs website or the male clinics website, they very clearly state that memory problems are a known, well acknowledged side effect of these drugs because you are depleting your brain of something that is so essential, and for people to think, to even think that they can reduce the amount of cholesterol in their body by eating less of it, it just doesn’t work that way. I mean your own body generates so much more cholesterol than you could ever eat unless you were eating literally like, nothing but egg yolks. It’s very, very difficult to change your blood cholesterol by changing the amount of cholesterol that you eat and you might not want to change the amount of your blood cholesterol. Elderly, they have shown over and over again, older people with higher cholesterol levels actually tend to have better cognitive function and the people with dementia tend to have lower cholesterol levels and higher cholesterol levels are protective of what they call all cause mortality which means your risk of dying from anything, at any particular age, is less when your cholesterol is higher in your older years. Everyone dies of something but it just means like your risk of dying early is less if your cholesterol is actually higher. This cholesterol thing is just so misunderstood, you know people who have heart disease and who have heart attacks run the gambit of low cholesterol, high cholesterol and everything in between. The amount of cholesterol in your blood stream tells you absolutely nothing about the amount of plaque in your arteries. If people take nothing else away from this whole podcast, take away that.
Darren: Can our cholesterol get too high in relation to Alzheimer? Obviously, if it’s too low you are going to lose your memory, that’s already a known thing, especially with the statins. But is there a point where it’s too high to where it’s dangerous as well?
Amy: That’s a really good question and I am going to say I don’t know. There probably is but there are people even with cholesterol in 280/290 even to 300s that might not be problematic if you look at that cholesterol as one piece of a much larger picture. You want to look at your fasting insulin, look at your glucose, look at our markers of inflammation, you know, nobody should be looking at one measurement as the end all be all. So I don’t, it’s hard to say, cholesterol that’s too high in someone who is very inflamed, very sick, that could be a problem (static from 29.22 – 29.27) high. But I mean, most people, really don’t have to worry about the cholesterol being too high and I know the standard of care is if your cholesterol is over 200, the doctor wants to give you medication but they just, any cardiologist should be able to tell you that people that have heart disease have low and high and everything in between cholesterol.
Darren: As a segue way into just talking about our cells, and you can correct me if I am wrong, but when we talk about statins, we talk about lowering cholesterol but also one of the side effects of statin is that it actually ends up lowering CoQ10 and we need CoQ10 for our cells. Is that a bad thing when it comes to Alzheimer?
Amy: Oh that’s a terrible thing and not just for Alzheimer but yes you are correct. Statin, statin drugs reduce cholesterol by interfering with a biochemical pathway but the statins interfere with this pathway very, very far upstream. Cholesterol is one of the last things produced in this pathway and like you said, CoQ10, is also one of the very last things produced in this pathway. So the statin drugs don’t just stop cholesterol, they impair everything else in that pathway, all the downstream things. So yeah CoQ10 is required for some of the processes in which the cells actually create energy and like we said at the beginning, you know Alzheimer is an energy crisis in the brain, you lose the ability to generate energy in these cells. And this is why a very common side effect of statins is muscle pain and fatigue and muscle weakness, it’s because your body literally is not generating energy. So this is not, it’s not a surprise, at all, it’s not a mystery to me and I actually hesitate to call those ‘side effects’. These are not side effects, these are unavoidable affects of what happens when you impair this particular pathway, like they are not side effects, they are direct affects of what this drug is doing.
Darren: So let’s get into the brain and just talking about well, not even the brain, the body and the cells and the neurons and mitochondria because I thought that this was really interesting but I also was kind of ( giggy). I was gigged out because I got the kind of go back on my biology, things that I learnt in high school and college that I wasn’t able to call up until recently, going through your book and researching and getting on air with you. But one of the things about the cell membrane, when you kind of explained this earlier, is that, I call, it must be structurally permeable, it must have, it must be able to let things in but also keep things out. But explain the cell membrane and its importance, especially with the brain and then talk about neurons and also mitochondria because mitochondria are really important. From what I remember, they are kind of what I call the power houses of the cells.
Amy: They are yeah. So let’s start with the membranes I guess. In my book I call them the bouncers of the body. It’s kind of like a bouncer at a club. The cell membrane has to let certain things in and keep certain things out and if the cell membrane is not built correctly, if it doesn’t have the right structure then that function is not going to work and the cell membrane is mostly built out of fat and is also built out of cholesterol. So we need a certain amount of those things, but we also need the right kind. Like we said with the fats before, and you know, why is that important, what are the kinds of things that get into the cells? Nutrients! Things like zinc, things like vitamin B12 and (colin 33.17) and all these other nutrients that we need for healthy brain function, healthy cellular function all over the body but you know, we are talking specifically about the brain. So if we want to talk about neurons, there are a lot of different types of cells in the brain. Neurons are one of them and they are the ones that are most affected in Alzheimer’s disease and the way that these cells communicate with each other, is that they, one neuron sends out a signal and it kind of connects to a lot of other neurons from a synapses. Synapses the places where the neurons, they don’t actually touch, but it’s like a little space across which these nutrients and different messages get transmitted and the synapse also has to have the right shape and this whole, entire apparatus is surrounded by these membranes. So if the synapses doesn’t have the right shape or the right structure then everything falls apart. And the same thing with the mitochondria. And you are right, the mitochondria are what we would call the powerhouses or the generators of the cell. They are where the vast majority of energy is actually created inside the cell and there are so many neurological conditions these days that are being linked to problems with the mitochondria so not just Alzheimer but Multiple Sclerosis, Parkinson’s disease, ALS also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, all of these involve some type of problem with the mitochondria generating energy which is why in Alzheimer, you know, you lose your memory but in some of these other conditions where it’s the motor neurons that are affected, the neurons that help you move, that’s why in ALS and Multiple Sclerosis you have all this muscle weakness and you end up in a wheel chair. So, I mean, Alzheimer is fascinating to me because the mitochondria are damaged to some extent and we mentioned earlier that they lose the ability to use glucose as energy, except the mitochondria in Alzheimer can still use something called ketones which is another type of fuel, it’s another type of energy, I don’t know how much we want to get into that. But basically, any condition where your mitochondria are not generating enough fuel is going to be devastating whether it happens in your brain or any other part of your body.
Darren: Yeah. It’s just so funny that you were talking about Lou Gehrig’s, you talked about Multiple Sclerosis and all these things are auto immune, and we are having this exploding auto immune issue in the United States and a lot of people have auto immune diseases but it’s so funny that it all relates back to mitochondria and the powerhouses within the cells. Getting into what’s out there for our elderly when they have Alzheimer’s disease or they are diagnosed with dementia or any other thing that’s out there, Parkinson’s or whatever, how effective are the pharmaceuticals out there for these types of conditions?
Amy: Well, I can’t speak too much for the other conditions, but for Alzheimer, there is really nothing. There are some pharmaceutical drugs but they are largely ineffective, they do very little to halt the disease progression, they do almost nothing to improve the symptoms, it’s really just, it’s kind of like the drug version of lip service. It’s like here’s your pill but it’s not really going to do anything. It’s a tragedy. It’s a tragedy that after all the years and all the billions of dollars that have been funneled into research, we were basically left with nothing and it’s not that there haven’t been drugs, there’s actually been a lot of drugs developed that just haven’t really had any effect at all on the condition.
Darren: Nothing that seems to pan out.
Amy: Nothing that pans out. Yeah and I think it’s because we are, the drugs are designed to chase symptoms ,you know each drug is designed to go after one particular thing that they see going wrong in this disease, rather than having something to go at what the root cause is, what is the fundamental problem in this illness.
Darren: This is something that blew my mind and I wanted to ask you about it and kind of get it from the horse’s mouth so to speak, but when I read this, my jaw kind of dropped to the floor, and it was pernicious anemia and the whole stomach acid B12 thing and the link to anemia. Can you talk about that a little bit more?
Amy: Yeah I would love to talk about that. So, vitamin B12 is really critical for brain function, it’s critical for the whole body but it’s really important for the brain. One reason is because, many reasons, but the biggest one is that the myelin sheath requires vitamin B12 and the myelin sheath, if you think of your neurons like, I said it backwards, I mean, the way the brain communicates, it is via electrical signals and it’s like a plug, or like a cord from an electrical appliance you have in your kitchen. It’s surrounded by this rubber thing because you can’t just have that metal, that live wire, not protected by anything that’s what the myelin does for your neurons. It protects the cells and it sort of insulates that electrical signal. So if you don’t have enough B12, you are not going to have proper functioning myelin and so many of our elders have been on prescription anti acids or even if they are not prescription anti acids, many of them pop Tums and Rawlins like they are candy and you know, these drugs inhibit the body’s ability to break down food and absorb nutrients. B12 deficiency is a well known, you know, risk and side effects from being on these drugs long term and B12 deficiency, one of the signs is memory loss and in the early stages, over the long term, the memory loss and the neurological damage from B12 deficiency is actually irreversible, so it’s tragic but caught early enough, you know, if you can supplement with B12, and get your levels back to where they need to be because I think in some cases, severe B12 deficiency is misdiagnosed as dementia and it is something that could actually be completely turned around if it was diagnosed properly. And it’s really terrible because we are combining our older folks and not just older folks but everybody being on these prescription strength anti acids, we combine that with a diet that’s low in B12, because again, we have been scared away from the foods that are richest in B12 such as red meat and egg yolks and shell fish and liver. All these foods that we have been scared away from because they are either high in fat or they are high in cholesterol but those are best sources of B12.
Darren: Uhuh. Yeah. Everybody seems to be scared of the good things, the good fatty things. You know…
Amy: It’s.. Yeah.. its…we have gotten it so backwards you know, your grandma was right with that kind of bacon grease and that was the classic picture out in the country. Everyone had that blue Maxwell House can with the bacon grease right on the kitchen counter.
Darren: Yeah I can see it in my mind, just sitting on top of the stove. You know, perfect world Amy, if the world was perfect and everybody then over indulged in carbs what would the brain, what type of fuel would the brain prefer to run on?
Amy: Well, the brain always needs glucose, even when you go on a very low carbohydrate diet, brain still needs some glucose. That doesn’t mean we have to eat a lot of glucose and carbohydrate. The body will generate glucose as needed from other things including amino acids from protein and including certain pieces of the molecules of fat that we eat. So I don’t think, even in a perfect world, I don’t think everybody needs to go on a crazy, crazy, very strict low carb diet but in a perfect world, the brain would be using the ketones, we mentioned earlier, at least every now and then, maybe not all the time but the body would bounce in and out of using ketones.
Darren: Yeah. I wanted to get into this too because this is a term that I heard when I was in Fitness, I am a Fitness trainer as well, and I remember when my instructor started talking about this gluconeogenesis, I thought it was just the coolest word because I had watched the Matrix and Neo’s in the Matrix and I would go around telling everybody ‘gluconeogenesis, gluconeogenesis’, like, and no one knew what it meant but I knew what it meant. But what is gluconeogenesis and why might it be important to understanding low carb and ketosis as a whole?
Amy: It’s a great word. I love that word and it’s a super fancy sounding word and all it really means is making new glucose. And what that means is the human body always needs some glucose, there is a reason that your blood glucose will never be zero, you know, it has to remain under a certain threshold amount to be healthy. But that doesn’t mean, so the fact that the body needs glucose doesn’t mean that we can only get that glucose by eating bagels and pasta and apple juice. We can make the glucose from protein and from fat and from other things and that’s what gluconeogenesis is and it’s when those processes kind of go on in the body all the time and it’s not a binary on and off thing, they happen all the time but gluconeogenesis ramps up more when it needs to. Like, for example, when you are not eating a lot of carbohydrate and your body still needs some glucose it’s going to kick those processes into action and make the glucose from other things. So there is really no danger of not having enough glucose if you are not eating any, I mean, you could actually survive just fine on what we call zero carbohydrate diet with no starch, no sugar whatsoever. I am not saying that’s recommended but you could actually do it because your body will make the glucose it needs from other things.
Darren: Let’s talk a little bit about the ketogenic diet because I know that’s something that..It’s really big right now and a lot of people are moving towards this ketogenic diet. If you did the research, you know about Alzheimer’s disease, if you had a loved one that is suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, would you switch them to a ketogenic diet and why?
Amy: I absolutely would and why is because I think I mentioned before, maybe I am getting..no I am not going to make a joke about that but I think I did mention earlier that even though the brain has lost the ability to metabolize glucose, it can still metabolize ketones and so it’s almost like, it’s a way, a ketogenic diet is a way of giving these starving neurons an alternative fuel that they can use. And they have done a lot of studies both in animals and in humans with Alzheimer’s disease that when we get these peoples ketone levels elevated, they do show improved cognitive function. And you know, you can elevate ketones in a bunch of different ways and a ketogenic diet is one way to start but the fact that so many people show improved cognition when they have higher ketone levels tells us that these brain cells are not dead. They can’t like I said earlier, they atrophy and they wither and I did say they die, I think in the long term they die but you know, caught in the early stages, the cells are not dead. If they were dead, nobody would respond to a ketogenic diet or exergonic ketones, nobody would improve, like if these cells were completely gone, nothing you do would make this person better but these people do have improvement so that tells us these cells are more like hibernating, they are kind of like in low power mode or like power save mode until they finally get this great fuel that they can use. And why, you know why hasn’t anyone really quote unquote cured or reversed Alzheimer’s? Because nobody knows about this, I mean, that’s why I had to write this book. Nobody is trying to give these people a ketogenic diet and it’s not easy, I mean, it is certainly not easy to get someone with severe dementia who might be belligerent who might have behavioral problems, it’s really difficult to get them to change their diet so I am not saying it’s easy but if you can do it, I do think it helps cognitive function and it..questions remain as to whether this actually reverses some of the damage that’s been done over the long term or is it just that.. is it like putting a band aid on like it just kind of helps their thinking clarity in the short term but you know, underneath the disease is still progressing. That’s kind of like remains to be seen. Either way, this is worth doing because even if the disease is still progressing if this person is able to behave more like their old self or their cognition is better, not only is their quality of life improved but the loved ones and caregivers, their quality of life is improved and really in the severe stages of this disease, the people afflicted with the condition are not the ones that suffer, it’s their loved ones, it’s their children, it’s their spouse, the people that have to watch this person go through it and deal with the consequences. So I think even if it doesn’t actually reverse it, I think it’s still worth doing. I could talk real quick about Dr Dale Bredesen’s work. This is a physician who has, in his words, reversed Alzheimer. They have actually done scans on one of his patients where his brain had shrunk. You can actually see this on the brain scan, the matter of his brain has shrunk and after several months of being on Dr Bredesen’s protocol, his brain has, you know, reclaimed some of its volume. I don’t think it came back to like its full size but they have clearly actually reversed some of the damage and so many of the people on his protocol show such great improvements in cognition. And his program is not even a ketogenic diet, it’s kind of a low glycemic, low carb diet higher fat, lots of coconut oil and MCT oil which helps the body make ketones, more sleep, like lots, almost all of the interventions in Dr Bredesen’s protocol do something about improving insulin resistance and I think that’s probably at the heart of why it’s effective, the way it is.
Darren: Yeah. I want to ask you a little bit more about coconut oil and some other things that I have heard about Alzheimer just to see where they are, but before I do that, and I guess you hit this, is it possible for someone to go on this type of diet, ketogenic diet, and at some point reverse or stop the symptoms of it? I think you answered that but, maybe again, you might want to elaborate.
Amy: Yeah, I think it’s not known. I don’t think it’s known for sure whether, if we can retard the progress of the disease, you know, the progression, kind of slow it down. We may not be able to stop it completely but we could, at least, slow it down. Make it a more gradual decline and then you know, maybe we can undo the damage, I think. I don’t think that’s known for certain. I think we need a lot more research to be done there and Dr Bredesen now is training people all over the country you know, doctors and nutritionists, in his protocol. So hopefully, we are going to start finding out. Hopefully we will get the answers to that so I wish I could say like yes this is a slam dunk, this slows down Alzheimer but I don’t think I can say that with confidence. What I can say is, this is promising. It should work. Will it work? You know, we haven’t had enough people try it. But based on the biochemical mechanisms at work and what the ketogenic diet does, I don’t know why it wouldn’t work. Now, I will say it’s probably going to be more effective in people that are younger and people whose dementia is less advanced, you know, if you are talking about someone who is 65 and is still up and about, maybe they can actually exercise a little bit versus somebody who is 88. That’s kind of a different story. But especially considering, there are absolutely no other effective interventions, no pharmaceutical drugs that helps this condition. This is, in my opinion, the most promising thing we have and I am not saying like oh well we have no drugs therefore this is the only option. But I am saying this is an option because of the way the ketogenic diet helps refuel the brain.
Darren: I want to get into diet and some of the missives I have heard about Alzheimer’s disease just to kind of let you dispel some of those, or maybe agree with those. But before I do, are there any tests, if you are a young person out there, are there any tests you may want to have run to see if you have the propensity to develop Alzheimer? Is there a certain gene you should be looking for when you are doing this?
Amy: Good question. So number one, I would say make sure that when you get your regular checkups, insist on getting a fasting insulin test because if your insulin level is starting to creep up, that’s a warning sign. But, in terms of the genetics, yeah, you can have your APOE status tested and this is just a blood test, you only get it once because it’s a genetic factor it doesn’t change. And other then the chronically high insulin, the APOE4 gene is the largest known genetic risk factor for Alzheimer and that doesn’t mean that having this APOE 4 gene causes Alzheimer, it increases your susceptibility but to be clear, a lot of people with the E4 gene who do not develop Alzheimer’s disease and there are many, many millions of people with Alzheimer that do not carry that E4 gene. So having it is not a death sentence and not having it is not a get out of jail free card. You can trigger Alzheimer, regardless of what your genes are. But I will say, if you have a maternal family history of it, meaning if the women in your family, your mother, your grandmother, your aunts, have had dementia, you are more likely to get it than if your male lineage has got it. It’s not for certain, I mean, you are not in the clear if only the men in your family have been affected but to the extent that mitochondria are affecting, you know, some development of Alzheimer, we actually inherit all of our mitochondria from our mothers. At conception, there is no mitochondria passed on through the sperm, maybe there are like some tiny exceptions, but we get almost all our mitochondria from our mother. So if you have a maternal family history it does seem to have a higher risk.
Darren: Alright. Getting into some of the things that I have heard and I wanted to, kind of, get them from you. One of the things I have heard is aluminum. Aluminum has been seen in the brains of people with Alzheimer, dementia; how true is that?

Amy: I will answer honestly; I don’t know how true it is. I have heard that too, I haven’t looked at the lot of the research on that. To the extent that aluminum toxicity in the brain is interfering with glucose metabolism, then I think it could be a factor. Otherwise, I am not really sure how it would interfere and I do think that the fundamental problem in Alzheimer’s disease is the loss of this glucose metabolism in the brain. So I am not saying it’s unrelated, but I am saying like, that would be the connection that I would look for.
Darren: How effective is coconut oil in helping with the symptoms of Alzheimer’s?
Amy: Coconut oil is kind of amazing. I am not going to use the word miracle but there I said it, no I mean, coconut oil contains a special type of fat that the body more readily converts into ketones than other fats. So, the really fascinating thing about coconut oil and also MCT oil, Medium-chain triglyceride that is the special type of fat that’s found in coconut oil. You can now buy purified MCT oil online and in health food stores. This particular fat will elevate somebody’s ketone levels even when they are still eating a high carbohydrate diet. That’s why this is so promising. Because like I said earlier, there are a lot of people who are very sick with this illness. You are not going to get them overnight, to trade in their cereal and orange juice and muffin for eggs cooked in butter or coconut oil. So, whoever prepares food for this person, can, maybe, start cooking a ton of, you know, cook everything in coconut oil, put coconut milk in a smoothie.
Dr Mary Newport is a physician whose husband had Alzheimer’s disease and she, she’s kind of a pretty prominent researcher now, but when she first started out, she was just looking for ways to help him and she read a little bit about coconut oil and ketones and the brain and she did nothing at first except add coconut oil to his oatmeal. She didn’t change his diet at all. He was not on a ketogenic diet and even with just that, she noticed an improvement in his cognition. And so, that led her to research much more about ketones and the ketogenic diet but, I mean, that’s how powerful these things are that even in someone who has made no other changes to their diet or lifestyle, eating a lot of coconut can help. Now, I don’t think that that’s going to do anything to halt the disease progression or to reverse some of the damage that’s already been done, I think that only manages the symptoms in the short term, but we shouldn’t dismiss the importance of that. That’s a huge deal you know.
Darren: Let’s weigh more towards the diet because I know people out there listening to me are going to be like what did she do for diet? Obviously, a ketogenic diet is low carb, high fat. One of the things I wanted to ask you and you made a very good distinction in the book with this was talking about vegetables. Because many people do not understand vegetables are carbs and that was something that was a realization to me coming through Fitness because I was always told you can eat as many vegetables as you want without any side effect. Is that true when it comes to a diet like the ketogenic diet in helping out with Alzheimer?
Amy: No, it is not true. So, there’s a lot of different kinds of carbohydrate right. There are starchy carbohydrates which we think of as you know, the grains, wheat, corn, oats, rice and all the things that are made from that, you know, pasta, bread, cereal, cookies, crackers. But there is also non-starchy carbohydrates. So, people, maybe, don’t realize that lettuce is a carbohydrate and broccoli, asparagus, egg plant, those are carbohydrates. They are not starchy but they are still carbohydrates because they are obviously not fat and they don’t seem like proteins. Well, there’s only one thing left, that’s carbohydrate. So people that are doing a low carb ketogenic diet can eat a fair amount of those non-starchy carbohydrates and some people can even eat a little bit of fruit especially berries because they are low range sugar than something like mangoes or cantaloupe. So, no, people don’t need to be afraid of carbohydrate but they have to know the right kinds of carbohydrate to eat and to be clear, you know, I try to emphasize that, I don’t think wholesome, unrefined carbohydrates even starchy ones like potatoes and beans and beets and yams, I don’t think those are causing insulin resistance or causing dementia. However, once your brain is already to the point that it can’t metabolize glucose due to other factors such as the refined sugar and the refined grains and the, you know, the unhealthy vegetable oils, once your brain has already got to the point where it can’t use glucose well, then it does no good to keep flooding your body with more glucose from all these starchy carbohydrates. So, if somebody is looking to use diet to potentially ward off dementia, I don’t know that a very strict ketogenic diet is required or whether people need to be afraid of eating lentils or chickpeas. But once you are already in the disease and it’s already advanced, there is just no point to keep fuelling on starch and sugar.
Darren: Protein. How important is protein and should we be afraid of red meat when it comes to Alzheimer’s disease?
Amy: I don’t think we should, no. I think protein is very important and most older people actually don’t eat enough of it because, you know, somebody who is older and especially if they live by themselves, it’s just easier for them to make a bowl of oatmeal for dinner than for them to grill a pork chop, you know, or for them to cook a steak. Let alone if they even have the dexterity in their hands any more to cut it or chew it, you know a lot of older people have dentures, I mean, these are real life issues that people have to take into account. So no, we don’t need to be afraid of protein and we don’t need to be afraid of red meat, I mean, that’s just been debunked over and over and over again. People on very strict ketogenic diets have to be careful not to overdo protein because when you eat a lot of protein it can interfere with ketosis but for most people that’s not a problem. Most people would have to work to over consume proteins like to cross the threshold into what we would consider too much and too much is going to be an individual thing. I mean I couldn’t even give you a ball park and I actually think most older people just don’t eat enough protein so I wouldn’t worry in their cases.
Darren: Yeah. This question’s popped into my mind and I wanted to ask you real quick before I ask you about fruit, but if you were a care taker of someone who has Alzheimer, obviously you have to test them for ketones if they are going to go on this ketogenic diet. What’s the most effective way to do that because I know from this past experience just talking to others about ketogenic diets, they usually do the blood and you are pricking a person’s finger or something of that nature but is it like I said, it isn’t going to be an easy thing to sit there with someone who is elderly and pricking their finger. How can you, is there a way to get around that or is it something that you are going to have to do?

Amy: Well no. That’s a good question. My first, the first thing I would say is you don’t have to test. It helps to test because testing will at least prove to you ok this person is actually in ketosis because if they are not, you know, if you have had somebody on a ketogenic diet or you are giving them coconut oil or exergonix ketones, and it’s been 6 weeks and you don’t notice any improvement whatsoever in their cognitive function, maybe they are not actually in ketosis and so measuring is a way for you to see whether or not they are actually in ketosis and that can guide you to making changes to what you are doing with them. So…but I think implementing this diet is hard enough, I don’t want people to think that they have to test because you are right, it is difficult especially with somebody who is elderly or someone who, you know, if they don’t need help to use the bathroom, you know, are you going to get them to want to test because you can test in urine too, this little test trip that you just basically have to run through your urine stream. That’s probably the easiest way to do it because it’s non invasive, you know you don’t have to prick their finger. There is a breathe meter so you can test with breathe and the breathe meter is probably the most economical. The urine test strips are not expensive, the blood test strips are very expensive, it’s pretty cost prohibitive for people to test that way. With the urine strips though, there is a lot of kind of confusion about them, they are not that accurate and when you are testing your urine you know, those are ketones you are excreting, so you are not actually using those you are peeing them up literally but that’s still an indicator that you have produced ketones and most likely there are some in your blood and some fuelling your brain. I would say just watch the person. If their ketones are elevated or even if their ketones aren’t that elevated, if some type of fuelling switch has happened in their brain, you will know it. They will start acting differently, they will start, you know, remembering words differently, I mean, depending on how severe the dementia is, you might be able to know it or they might even be able to tell you that they feel different.
Darren: Couple more questions I need to ask you. One is fruit. How…are they allowed to eat fruit if they have this condition or what would you stay away from when it comes to fruit?
Amy: Fruit is totally acceptable as long as it’s a certain kind of fruit. I think berries are ok. Berries are very high in some of the compounds that might be helpful for cognitive function. Some of these polyphenols, I know, blueberries are sort of celebrated in the Alzheimer community but raspberries contain the same thing. I would stay away from grapes, from apples, from pears from things that are kind of higher in sugar and a little bit lower in fiber. That being said, there is nothing that you can get from fruit that you can’t get from non-starchy vegetables whether its vitamin C or fiber or beta carotene. There are no vitamins and minerals that you get from fruit that you can’t get from, not just vegetables, but from animal proteins. People have no idea how nutri intense meat is, eggs, I mean, beef, liver, poultry. Like these things are loaded with vitamins and minerals. People don’t realize, you know, we tend to think of fruits and vegetables, when we think of those things so you could absolutely go zero fruit if you wanted to. But if your loved one really enjoys fruit, fruit is ok but you really have to keep the amount small because it just builds up very quickly, you know, for the same amount of carbohydrate in a handful of grapes you can probably have 3 bowls of broccoli.
Darren: How advantageous is it to be gluten free if you are, if there is someone out there that you are taking care of or you have Alzheimer’s disease?
Amy: That is a good question! Some people, I think Dr Perimutter among them, who is really well known for brain health, think that everybody should be gluten free and especially Alzheimer patients. They think that gluten is directly neurotoxic. I, I just don’t know because I think there are certain products that contain gluten that can be very helpful for people to comply with a low carbohydrate or ketogenic diet and I mean things like very high fiber, low carbohydrate crackers and like bran crisps, things that make this diet more palatable and more enjoyable but they do contain gluten, but are still very, very low carbohydrate, you know, you could have 3 or 4 crackers and its maybe 3 or 4 grams of carbohydrate total versus, you know, 20 grams in a slice of bread. So if you wanted to do gluten free, you absolutely can. I don’t think it’s required. I know there are other, you know, there are doctors and other experts that would disagree with me and I, I would sort of, I would defer to their expertise. I think if somebody has the wherewithal to go gluten free, do it but I don’t, I just don’t think that’s where the biggest bank for the book is with this diet.
Darren: Uhuh. I am gluten free but you know I just decided because I was sensitive to gluten, to kick it out of my diet, it’s been good for me. The next question is just exercise. Obviously if someone is in cognitive decline, they are not going to be able to exercise but is exercise one of those things that might deter or kind of slow down or retard Alzheimer’s disease in the long run?
Amy: Yeah I think it is and the research seems to support it but you are right, I mean, for people that have very severe dementia it’s not safe for them to exercise, so it’s like…exercise is kind of icing on the cake I think if very low carb ketogenic diet is like the money show, that’s where the real power is, all this other stuff is a bonus if you can, if it’s safe for the person to do. So the exercise, I think the reason it might be good for brain health is that it’s so good for insulin sensitivity and to the extent that Alzheimer is a problem of insulin resistance, anything you can do to improve insulin sensitivity is going to help. The other thing with exercise is that, there is a compound called brain derived neurotrophic factor BDNF and I was on an interview with a doctor who called BDNF, miracle grow for your neurons and you know, we are led to believe, like, you never make new neurons, you don’t generate new neurons like you are just born with your brain cells and that’s it. But that’s not true, we do make new neurons and we make new synapses, new pathways for these neurons to connect with each other and this BDNF is very helpful for that process and kind of stimulates that process to happen. And exercise is one of the most powerful ways to increase BDNF.
Darren: Yeah. The last question is this and we just talked about insulin sensitivity and kind of reducing that but what about fasting? Because I know fasting does that. But can you implement fasting in someone who has Alzheimer’s disease or someone who has the onset of AD?
Amy: You can but if the person is underweight, I don’t recommend fasting and there are a lot of older people that are underweight. If somebody is overweight or has high insulin levels, I think fasting is actually one of the best things they can do. Because there are some people who are so highly resistant to insulin and have such a low insulin sensitivity that even when they eat a low carb diet, their insulin levels still don’t really come down that much, like even when they eat a low carb meal. So eating no meal is really one of the only things that gets their insulin to come down. I don’t think everyone has to do a long term fast, you could even do like 24 hours once a week or you know, they have this intermittent fasting with a compressed eating window so meaning you only eat for 8 hours a day meaning like let’s say between what 10 and 6 or something, is that 8 hours? Like you only eat food between 10am and 6pm, maybe you have breakfast at 10, you have dinner at 6 and that’s it. You don’t eat outside that window, so you still spend more than half the day in a fasted state. So, yeah, I think fasting can be extremely therapeutic but it should, it’s not appropriate for everybody so you kind of have to watch out as to whether it’s right for the person.
Darren: Yeah. This just came to my mind. This is absolutely the last question because I normally keep you that much more but we have been brought up to eat 3 meals a day and then in between those, most people are snacking as well. Do you think that has contributed to our insulin levels rising and we also, far off from that, that has contributed to AD - Alzheimer’s disease? Because we are eating so frequently, because I know one of the things in the Fitness arena is you got to eat 3 meals a day, keep your metabolism stoked. But is that fuelling the fire for problems later on?
Amy: I think it is and now I want to come give you your second hug of this interview. (Laughter) No I do, I think it’s so unnatural to be constantly snacking throughout the day. You know, I am not, like, you shouldn’t feel bad if you snack, you shouldn’t feel ashamed of yourself if you are hypoglycemic, if you feel better with snacking then snack, but, I do think, especially people with insulin resistance, you know, the worst thing you can do is be eating all day. Be grazing all day. Because your insulin levels never get a chance to return to base line, they never get a chance to come back down to normal because you are constantly raising them every time you eat. Even if you eat low carb food, your insulin is still going to go up a little bit, like, if you are having pepperoni and cheese as a snack, you know if you are snacking on a pat of butter then you are fine, you know, some people do that but not most. I think 3 squares a day is good, even 2 squares a day or 1 square a day, you know, some people get used to fasting where they eat one meal a day and it’s a very large meal but they only eat once a day or some people eat twice a day. This constant snacking is just, I don’t know if it’s like a ploy by the food industry but you know, I don’t know how it is overseas but in America now, you go into a shoe store and there is a snack display and you go into Best Buy to buy a TV and there’s food. Like, there’s food in places where there should not be food and we are sort of led to believe that its, that its necessary to be constantly eating and I just don’t. I don’t think it is. I think most people are actually not even hungry, they are bored and if they are not bored, they are not hungry, they are hypoglycemic. Like if you eat enough protein and enough fat at a meal you shouldn’t feel the need to eat again for about 3 or 4 hours. You know if you are hungry 2 hours after a meal, you either didn’t eat enough at that meal or you probably didn’t eat enough protein and I find that is probably the number one thing that leads women to binge on sugar late at night is most of them are not eating anywhere near enough protein.
Darren: Yeah. This could be totally another interview so (Laughter) I hope you will be back some time. Amy, thank you for coming on and your book is The Alzheimer’s Antidote and is available on what? all the local book outlets; Amazon…
Amy: Yeah it’s on Amazon, it should be at Barnes & Noble, big book stores, there is a kindle version, there is no audible version at this time but we might try to do that for the future but yeah you can definitely get it on Amazon.
Darren: Ok. And do you have a website? If people want to check you out, where would they go?
Amy: Yeah my site is tuitnutrition.com and it’s kind of just my blog for now but over the next few months I will be adding a lot more content especially for people that are new to low carb and kind of how to help them get started.
Darren: Cool. Amy Berger thanks for being on.
Amy: Thank you so much. You really did your homework. Great questions.
Darren: Thanks.