Suiker en de ziekte van Alzheimer.*
Teveel suiker in de voeding zou ook wel eens een duidelijk verhoogde kans kunnen geven op het ontstaan van de ziekte van Alzheimer. Uit verschillende recente studies blijkt al dat mensen met diabetes type-2 een hogere kans op het krijgen van de ziekte van Alzheimer hebben. Daarom nu deze studie weliswaar met muizen om te kijken of suikerrijke voeding invloed heeft op het ontstaan van de ziekte van Alzheimer. De ene groep muizen kreeg bij hun voeding gewoon water en de andere groep kreeg water, wat voor 10% suiker bevatte. Na 25 weken waren de muizen in de suikergroep gemiddeld 17% zwaarder en hadden veel hogere bloedwaarden
vet, suiker en de eerste tekenen van diabetes. Ook had deze groep 2,5 tot 3 keer meer eiwitten in de hersenen die verantwoordelijk zijn voor de vorming van plaques, de kenmerken voor het ontstaan van de ziekte van Alzheimer. Gelet op de enorme toename van het drinken van suikerhoudende dranken de laatste tientallen jaren zal dit ook wel eens, bij onaangepaste voedingsgewoontes, het gevolg kunnen hebben van een enorme toename van het aantal mensen met Alzheimer.
Sugar promotes Alzheimer's-like disease in mice
- Eating too much sugar could be bad for your brain as well as your teeth, the results of a new study with mice suggests.
Mice bred to develop an Alzheimer's-like disease that were given sugar-sweetened water had a greater decline in learning skills and memory compared with mice that drank pure water, Dr. Dongfeng Cao and colleagues from the University of Alabama at Birmingham found. What's more, the animals that consumed sugar had a greater degree of Alzheimer's-like damage to their brains.
"Our findings are of tremendous importance given that the consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages has increased dramatically over the past decades and will most likely remain high in modern societies," Cao and his team said.
Several recent studies have found that people with type 2 diabetes are at increased risk of developing Alzheimer's disease, the researchers point out in the Journal of Biological Chemistry. But it has not been clear how diabetes could influence Alzheimer's disease development.
To look at the effects of a high-sugar diet, the researchers compared mice given water containing 10 percent sucrose with mice that drank plain water. Sucrose is common table sugar.
After 25 weeks, the animals given sweetened water weighed 17 percent more than the control mice. While the sucrose-drinking mice ate less food than those given plain water, the amount of sucrose they consumed pushed their calorie consumption 15 percent higher; they obtained 43 percent of their total calories from sucrose. These mice also developed early signs of diabetes and had excessive amounts of fat in their blood.
In behavioral tests, the mice given sweetened water also showed significant impairments in learning and memory compared to those given pure water.
The brains of the sucrose-fed animals had 3-times the amount of the Alzheimer's-associated protein amyloid-beta, and roughly 2.5-times as much apolipoprotein-E, a protein that, in mice, promotes the formation of the "plaques" and "tangles" in brain tissue that are the hallmark of the disease.
The amount of sucrose the mice consumed was equivalent to a human drinking five 12-ounce cans of sugar-sweetened soda a day, Cao and colleagues noted. But it's possible people wouldn't have to consume this much sucrose for similar brain changes to develop, they add, given that the soda was the only sucrose source in the animals' diet and that mice have a metabolic rate that is 7-times higher than humans'.
Based on these findings, the researchers conclude: "Controlling the consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages may be an effective way to curtail the risk of developing Alzheimer's disease."
SOURCE: Journal of Biological Chemistry (Januari
2008)
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