Amyloid & Apple Juice

The sixth leading cause of death in the United States continues to be Alzheimer’s disease, currently afflicting nearly five million Americans.

The disease process involves the buildup of a protein in the brain called amyloid beta, which is neurotoxic—it kills brain cells, leading to brain shrinkage, cognitive decline, and eventually death.

In May 1970, a four-year-old girl we know only by her initials, L. S., presented to Sloan-Kettering with a nerve tumor. They cut it out; radiation, chemo, nothing helped, and she died months later. But her cancer lives on, still going 40 years later in laboratories around the world. An undying cell line of human nerve cells.

And that’s one way new Alzheimer’s treatments are tested. You take a petri dish of these nerve cells, expose them to the neurotoxic Alzheimer’s protein amyloid beta, and they die. This is a measure of cell death. Then you do the same thing, but this time you add a substance X, whatever you’re testing, to see if it saves the nerve cells from death.

First you just add a little, a 1 in 100 dilution, and if you’re lucky, less death. Aha! So, you add a little more, a 1 in 50 dilution, and if you’re really lucky, whoa, back to control. It’s like you never even added amyloid at all. Completely blocked the neurotoxicity of amyloid beta.

What is this substance X? What is this “AJC”? Apple juice concentrate. Seriously, they just dripped some diluted apple juice on some nerve cells, and, at least in a petri dish, it worked.

A similar finding was reported this year with ginger. The control cells have 100% viability, but half die when you add amyloid beta. But adding a little ginger, or a little more, improves nerve cell survival.

The question I had when I read this study, though, was why didn’t they use the whole apple, blended up, instead of just using apple juice? As always, follow the money. He who pays the piper picks the tune. And the study was funded by the Processed Apples Institute.

To see any graphs, charts, graphics, images, and quotes to which Dr. Greger may be referring, watch the above video. This is just an approximation of the audio contributed by Peter Mellor.

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• Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 2011. Deaths: Preliminary Data for 2009.
• Lee C, Park GH, Kim CY, Jang JH. [6]-Gingerol attenuates β-amyloid-induced oxidative cell death via fortifying cellular antioxidant defense system. Food Chem Toxicol. 2011 Jun;49(6):1261-9.
• Ortiz D, Shea TB. Apple juice prevents oxidative stress induced by amyloid-beta in culture. J Alzheimers Dis. 2004 Feb;6(1):27-30.
• Biedler JL, Helson L, Spengler BA. Morphology and growth, tumorigenicity, and cytogenetics of human neuroblastoma cells in continuous culture. Cancer Res. 1973 Nov;33(11):2643-52.

Images thanks to the Alzheimer’s Disease Education and Referral Center, a service of the National Institute on Aging, and Jensflorian, as well as iamnotanorange, via Wikimedia Commons.

• Alzheimer’s disease
• apple juice
• brain health
• dementia
• ginger
• industry influence
• juice
• mortality
• nerve health
• neurotoxins