By Jo Ellen Bleavins of assisted living provider BMA Management, Ltd.
On Tuesday, Rick Banas of BMA Management posted a Blog about a keynote address that those of us attending the recent Life Services Network 2012 Annual Meeting & Exho heard on the topic of “Can We Prevent Alzheimer’s Disease?”
The speaker was aging and Alzheimer’s expert Dr. Gary Small of UCLA. There are things that you can do to help you potentially delay Alzheimer’s disease, Dr. Small said. Eating a healthy diet and maintaining an appropriate weight were among his suggestions.
Your brain, Dr. Small noted, is 70% fat so it makes sense to eat the types of fat that are good for you.
A few weeks before listening to Dr. Small, a colleague alerted me through an e-mail to a video about Coconut Oil and Alzheimer’s disease that was posted by The Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN).
In the video, Dr. Mary Newport of Tampa, Florida, talks about the positive impact that coconut oil appears to have had on her husband, who suffers from Alzheimer’s disease, since she started adding it to his diet.
You can view the video below
The coconut has been a staple in the diets of tropical cultures for thousands of years, and coconut oil is made from the meat of the coconut.
Research shows that eating coconut oil will raise your cholesterol level. The beauty is that it does not raise your LDL, or lousy, cholesterol level. Instead, coconut oil is the kind of dietary fat that raises your HDL, or healthy, cholesterol level.
In addition to potentially benefitting those with Alzheimer’s disease, researchers claim that coconut oil also has many other health benefits, as Dr. Beverly Teter of the University of Maryland notes in the video.
With this information, we are going to begin testing adding coconut oil to the diets of residents at the Bridle Brook assisted living, adult daycare and memory care community that we manage in Mahomet, Illinois. We’ll let you know what we learn.
is Senior Vice President of Management for BMA Management.
