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If there is one country that needs to move fast to prevent Alzheimer’s - it is China. And it is. With almost a quarter of its population over 60 - 320 million - 20 million of which will have Alzheimer’s by 2030, costing close to a trillion dollars a year - government health officials are taking prevention very seriously indeed.
Those over 60 are not called old, elderly or senior but ‘silver haired’ - a growing community that is at the heart of China’s health prevention strategies. The doctor in charge of the ‘Silver Haired Healthy Lifestyle’ campaign, is Dr Zhang Lei. He is a famous TV doctor and former surgeon.
I asked him if he believed there would be a cure for Alzheimer’s. “Prevention is the cure.” He said “And I want to make a special announcement: next year, when your excellent book Alzheimer's: Prevention is the Cure is published in Chinese, we will use this book as the cornerstone of our national prevention campaign. We already have direct access to 20 million people through our networks, but our ambition is to reach as many as 100 million. We will encourage everyone to take the online Cognitive Function Test from Food for the Brain. This book and this tool together will be our roadmap for a prevention revolution in China.”
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I attended and spoke at the 2nd Silver Haired Healthy Lifestyle Conference, met hundreds of silver-haired people like me, which was attended by 2,500 people, and broadcast to 10 million people across twenty TV channels. Other speakers were leading Professors of Public Health, Nutrition, Gerontology and Geriatrics, all with positive and progressive messages about prevention, including eating more seafood and vegetables, stopping smoking, cutting right back on sugar, sleeping better and taking 10,000 steps a day.
I spoke about the essential need for and co-dependence of omega-3, phospholipids and B vitamins. If omega-3 were the man and phospholipids, rich in eggs and seafood, were the woman, then B vitamins are the priest, I said. When they are married in your brain magic happens! They are the three building blocks of every brain cell.
You could have heard a pin drop. Everyone was listening and, in China, action is quickly taken. The former Health minister said ‘diet, supplements and lifestyle’ are the cornerstones of prevention. ‘We need education, not medication.’ I had no sense of the pro-drug, anti-supplement closed mindset of UK and US officials. No-one is talking about anti-amyloid treatments. Surely everyone knows by now that the amyloid theory is a busted flush? That the anti-amyloid drugs are worse then useless because they promote brain bleeds. That’s why our brains make amyloid deposits - to stop bleeds. They are the fireman, not the fire.
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Next year, when the 3rd Healthy Lifestyle conference will coincide with the Chinese publication of my book Alzheimer’s: Prevention is the Cure, I’ve been invited to talk at universities and health departments across China.
Many silver haired people in China don’t have computers but they all have smartphones. There are no phones. Talking and paying for things is conducted across the WeChat app.
The professors and public health officials were very excited about our online digital test. They want to get everyone using Food for the Brain’s Cognitive Function Test, soon to be released in China in a phone friendly version. The COGNITION questionnaire then helps a person know what specific prevention steps will help them the most. The experts, health authorities and policy makers understand that changing behaviour is the hardest part and that this kind of personalised digital technology is the key to motivating individuals - and measuring change to find out what really works. Big data science to sharpen up prevention strategy.
Traditionally the Chinese culture sees food as medicine, which may be one reason they are more open to optimum nutrition. They also have a tradition of natural compounds to treat diseases, so supplements are a natural extension of this. Not one person recited that old myth that ‘you can get all the nutrients you need from a well-balanced diet’.
I think the other factor is that government officials are not in bed with the pharmaceutical industry in the same way it is in the West. When GSK went in with bribe money, they were fined 3 billion yuan (roughly £300 million).
The stark ignoring of established scientific facts about, for example, B vitamins and omega-3, which have seriously outperformed dangerous anti-amyloid treatments, by our politicians and health ministers, is verging on criminal when the lives and brains of so many are at stake.
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As the high speed train, which has clocked 650 kilometres an hour, travelling 1,200 kilometres from Shanghai to Beijing in 3.5 hours - faster than taking a plane - I am contemplating how the UK have yet to deliver the promised high speed train from London to Birmingham, a little over 100 miles, in over a decade, shaving less than half an hour off current trains, and expected to cost over £100 billion pounds and still not open for a decade!
If this kind of incompetence continues to play out in health policy as it has in the past two decades, giving platitudes about the importance of prevention, but no action, and clear avoidance of the scientific evidence of what actual works, China’s nightmare of a big chunk of the silver haired slipping into dementia will become our reality.
Alzheimer’s is preventable. That is a fact not a belief. Those who say it cannot be done should not stand in the way of those who are doing it.
Patrick Holford
Founder of Food for the Brain
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