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If you’ve been paying any attention to the news or the Internet recently, you know what the “Ice Bucket Challenge” is.
It’s great that so many people have been motivated to try and help find a cure for ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s disease.
My concern is that most of that funding will go to finding a pharmaceutical drug that will attempt to treat the disease.
It’s sad, because we already have natural remedies that can greatly reduce your risk of ALS without having to take a dangerous drug. I’ll tell you more about those in a minute, but one thing we could do right now to stop ALS is to stop statin drug prescriptions.
Did you know that there’s a connection between this cholesterol-lowering category of drugs and ALS?
First, a World Health Organization drug monitoring group in Sweden started getting a flood of reports that statins – HMG-CoA reductase inhibitors – were associated with a “disproportionally high reporting of upper motor neurone lesions.” The kind one gets with ALS.1
But no one paid attention to the reports.
Mainstream medicine even ignored the evidence from researchers at the University of California, San Diego.
They did a “Statin Effects Study” that also looked into reports of the horrible effects of statin drugs. They found that ALL 10 people they looked at had ALS-like symptoms when taking their statin drugs, and ALL of them had the symptoms go away when they stopped taking the drug.2
(I’ll be talking to you more about how to protect your heart from mainstream medicine tomorrow.)
But let me get back to this Ice Bucket Challenge thing. There are other completely natural ways to help your body reduce the risk of ALS that you can use starting right now:
1) Vitamin B12 is a good example. We’ve known about its benefits for ALS patients for years. When you give people with ALS high doses of methylcobalamin, the most absorbable form of vitamin B12, they can move around much better and with less pain. They get a huge increase in muscle action potential amplitudes (CMAPs).3 That’s the measure they use to find how well and ALS sufferer can move around.
A normal does of B12 won’t do the trick though. In the study, people who got .5 mg a day showed no improvement in movement. You need much more.
Liver, red meat, clams and other shellfish are the best natural sources. That’s because B12 is only produced in the gut of animals. You can’t get it from plants. They don’t need B12 so they don’t store it. But animals do.
You can also supplement, but be aware that as you get older you may have difficulty absorbing vitamin B12. So use the most absorbable form which is methylcobalamin. It’s the active form of B12 that’s ready for your body to use. In addition, it’s the only form that can cross the blood brain barrier, so you can get it where you need it most. For brain protection, take at least 2,000 mcg per day.
2) The second thing to do is make sure you get enough omega-3s. I talk to you about these healthy fats often, and this is why. The mountain of evidence showing how omega-3s improve your health and protect you is staggering.
A new study out of Harvard I found when I was doing research on this – which hasn’t even been printed yet – looked at over 1 million people and their risk for ALS. It shows that high intake of omega-3 fatty acids can reduce the risk of ALS by 40-60%.4 Show me a drug that does that.
A good source of omega-3s is to eat more small oily fish like sardines or herring. Sardines are at the bottom of the ocean’s food chain. They only feed on plankton so they don’t build up heavy metals and other contaminants in their flesh like larger fish do.
To really ramp up your levels of omega-3, I recommend supplementing with a combination of squid and kill oils. In one study, people taking krill oil had their omega-3s skyrocket by 178%.5 And squid oil has more DHA, the brain-protective omega-3, than any other source on earth. In fact, some squid oils can contain over 65% DHA.6
Make sure you get more than 3 grams of omega-3 a day for complete brain protection.
To Your Good Health,
Al Sears, MD
1. Edwards I, Star K, Kiuru A. "Statins, neuromuscular degenerative disease and an amyotrophic lateral sclerosis-like syndrome: an analysis of individual case safety reports from vigibase." Drug Saf. 2007;30(6):515-25.
2. Golomb B, Kwon E, Koperski S, Evans M. "Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis-like conditions in possible association with cholesterol-lowering drugs: an analysis of patient reports to the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) Statin Effects Study." Drug Saf. 2009;32(8):649-61.
3. Kaji R, Kodama M, Imamura A, Hashida T, Kohara N, Ishizu M, Inui K, Kimura J. "Effect of ultrahigh-dose methylcobalamin on compound muscle action potentials in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis: a double-blind controlled study." Muscle Nerve. 1998;21(12):1775-8.
4. Fitzgerald K, O'Reilly E, Falcone G, McCullough M, Park Y, Kolonel L, Ascherio A. "Dietary ω-3 Polyunsaturated Fatty Acid Intake and Risk for Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis." JAMA Neurol. 2014 Jul 14. Epub ahead of print.
5. Maki K, Reeves M, Farmer M, Griinari M, Berge K, Vik H, Hubacher R, Rains T. "Krill oil supplementation increases plasma concentrations of EPA and DHA in overweight and obese men and women." Nutr Res. 2009;29(9):609-15.
6. Hwang L, Liang J. “Fractionation of urea-pretreated squid visceral oil ethyl esters.” Journal of the American Oil Chemists‘ Society 2001;Volume 78, Issue 5, pp 473-476.