Sorry to hear about your aunt ! Pick up the book "Grain Brain" which will tell you about the link between eating carbs and what it does to the health of your brain. Low carb appears to be a very good way to prevent the occurrence of diseases like Alzheimer's.

I can't help you with the dietary fat aspect but others here will likely be able to.

Goggle coconut oil and Alzheimer's for a starting place. There is a Dr. that has helped her husband get better.

It is low tech.

watch Tim Noakes on youtube. They are calling Alzheimer's T3DM

dashriver wrote: »

I can totally get in line with the low carb and sugar stuff. I'm finding a hard time believing the coconut oil is helpful. It feels too anecdotal, which I don't discard right away, I 'd just like a little more hard science that I can understand. Maybe it doesn't even exist right now. I really want to do everything I can to prevent Alzheimer's. But I will tell my mom about the coconut oil. Maybe she can pass it on to my aunt/her family and see if it makes a difference.

Actually, there's quite a bit of studying going on and the mechanisms are pretty sound, though there might not be specific tests for coconut oil and Alzheimer's. There is a fair bit of evidence that ketones have a neuroprotective and neurosupportive effect and have been shown to improve all sorts of neurological issues. It's also well-known that coconut oil gets converted pretty readily to ketones (coconut oil is primarily medium chain triglycerides, where are a close third (alcohol is first, glucose is second) on the "burn priority list" in the body). The logic, then, is that the ketones generated from the MCTs provide benefit to neurological disorders, which is useful until specific studies are conducted.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2367001/
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/evolutionary-psychiatry/201410/bold-new-experimental-treatment-alzheimers-dementia

Also, considering the percentage of the brain that is made of cholesterol and saturated fat, I doubt that dietary intake of those in humans is what's causing or contributing to the disease. They've been trying to link fat intake to sugar/insulin disorders for quite some time and the only ones that find positive correlations are the ones using a SAD diet as one of the parts, which isn't just high in fats, but high in PUFAs and refined carbohydrates. Anything comparing SAD with anything else, then saying it's one part of the SAD that's the culprit needs to be taken with a huge grain of salt or dismissed as invalid altogether. The SAD is pretty much the bottom of the barrel. It doesn't really matter what dietary route you take from there, because damn near everything else is going to be an improvement.

Yeah, unfortunately, there's a lot of conflicting stuff out there, and a lot of the studies are complete garbage. For whatever reason, nutrition/health research seems to be the field that everyone thinks is sufficient to use only the most basic and often horribly-constructed studies and seem to think that crappy surveys are anywhere near as good as double blind crossover trials. Part of it's the nature of health/nutrition, but part of it is just bad science, too. Even worse is the fact that media outlets will take a soundbite and run with it, even when that soundbite directly contradicts the conclusions of the study.

Your best bet is to learn how to distinguish the good studies from the bad. Take abstracts with a grain of salt unless you can get the full study. Look at the methods and make sure the writer's conclusion is consistent with the intervention (ie - if the subjects quit smoking, went on a particular diet, started an exercise regime, and joined a support group, and the writers conclude the diet was responsible for the subjects' health improvement, it's a bad conclusion and bad study). Look at the details of the intervention and see if they're valid (ie - Oscar Meyer hot dogs are not the same as grass fed steak, trans fats are not the same as saturated fats).

@dashriver below is about Dr. Mary Newport. Her husband has Alzheimer's.

https://bulletproofexec.com/podcast-13-how-to-take-care-of-your-brain-with-coconut-oil-ketones/

The author of Grain Brain has a new book out called Brainmaker that talks about the role of the gut microbiome related to Alzheimer's and other neurological disorders. It's really fascinating.