Let’s flash forward into a future place called Regret. You’re sitting there with a full time nurse to feed you and you can’t remember your adult children’s names let alone their faces. The reason? Alzheimer’s. Now, enter into the scene, Mr. In Retrospect. He’s the annoying reporter coming to interview you about past life choices. He sticks the microphone in your face and asks you one question, “Mrs. Alzheimer’s Sufferer, if you had it to do over again, would giving up sodas and candy THEN have been a small sacrifice in exchange for having a functioning brain NOW?”

Your  answer? Well, actually, you’ll look at him with a confused look and say “Who the hell are you and what are you talking about?”, because your brain doesn’t have the capacity to remember back to the place you used to dwell called Opportunity.  But if you could answer him with your present brain, you would of course, say, “YES, Mr. In Retrospect, losing soda and candy would have been a small sacrifice in exchange for a healthy brain. Sugary foods in exchange for not remembering my own name was not worth it!”

Well, guess what gals? I’m here to help prevent you from having to ever move to that horrid city called Regret! None of us wants to play out that scene in real life, so learn this: Researchers are saying that sugar is likely  one of the causes of Alzheimer’s disease. This is good news for two reasons. One, it means it might be easy to prevent. And two, everyone who smells like body odor because they gave up their aluminum antiperspirants when that cause-effect theory came out, may be able to return to a stench-free life. (Actually, the jury is still out on aluminum, so if you prefer body odor to the risk, keep stinking for awhile longer.)

But here’s the low down on the Alzheimer’s-sugar connection. The brain is coasting along, minding its own business (and everyone else’s if you’re a busy body) and it’s happily functioning as it should. Then you throw a little monkey wrench into your brain’s plan to live in gray matter bliss, by eating a bunch of sugar throughout your life. This causes what are called beta-amyloid  deposits, which are essentially protein deposits that park their annoying selves in your gray matter.

Researchers don’t fully understand the amyloid association with disease yet, but it is clear that Alzheimer’s patients have a high rate of amyloid deposits in their brains. (One famous case of a known sweet tooth who developed Alzheimer’s was the late President Ronald Reagan.)

So the solution is obvious. We must reduce if not eliminate, sugar from our diets. When doing this, a lot of people decide to replace sugar with artificial sweeteners. That’s the half-assed approach and if you want to be a Fit After Thirty woman, you shouldn’t voluntarily put harsh chemicals in your body, because they create other problems. So try not to do that.  Instead, here’s what you do.

1. Use Stevia, a natural sweetener that does not affect blood sugar the way sugar does, therefore it is possible that it won’t affect the brain the way sugar does. It comes in powder and liquid form.

2. Start looking at the beverages in your diet with the highest concentration of sugar, and remove those first. When you take sugar in a liquid form, you never realize just how much you are consuming. For most people, the culprits are soda, sugary coffee drinks and other sugar-laden energy beverages. If you can’t quit cold turkey and replace them with water, shoot for 3 days per week without sugary drinks and gradually increase the number of days without them.

3. Reduce sugar content in beverages by changing the ratio of liquid to sugar. With coffee drinks, ditch the syrup pumps and add one packet of sugar instead. After a week or two, reduce it further. With sodas and other drinks, dilute them with water, gradually increasing the water over time.

4. Look at your sugar intake through food sources. If you have a sugary pastry every morning and you aren’t ready to give up your starchy breakfast, at least substitute a whole wheat bagel or sugar free cereal 4 or 5 days per week to make a big dent in your sugar consumption.

5. Increase fruits in your diet. Sometimes consuming natural sweet treats is enough to reduce your cravings for sugar.

Now for the exciting news. There is a supplement you can incorporate into your diet called L-Carnosine which blocks the amyloid production thought to be caused by the sugar. (It also binds toxic metals and is a powerful anti-oxidant.) You can get this supplement online or from your local supplement store. The other great thing about L-Carnosine is that it doesn’t just prevent damage; it can repair it. So there is hope for some of us who have not made the healthiest choices up to this point!! 

I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’ll take Opportunity over Regret any day!