Holiday Re-Run Episode: Dr. Mary Newport ON Exploring Alzheimer's Prevention: The Power of Ketones, MCT Oil and the Ketogenic Strategy

In the podcast episode, the host interviews Dr. Mary Newport, an experienced pediatrician and neonatologist with more than 30 years of experience. The host and Dr. Newport discuss early onset Alzheimer's disease, the role of the ketogenic diet and medium-chain triglyceride (MCT) oil in its prevention and management, and the broader impact of dietary choices on brain and overall health.

00:00 Introduction: Ketones and Coffee Podcast

00:29 Interview with Dr. Mary Newport

00:36 Dr. Mary Newport's Background and Contributions

01:16 Discussion on Alzheimer's and the Effect of Ketogenic Intervention

02:36 Dr. Mary's Personal Journey and Research into Ketones for Brain Health

08:31 The Connection Between Diabetes of the Brain and Alzheimer's

10:21 Results of MCT and Coconut Oil on Alzheimer's Disease

Show Links:

• Link to Dr. Mary Newport’s bio:

Website: http://coconutketones.com

Books: 

Available on Amazon and many other book websites and stores

Clearly Keto for Healthy Brain Aging and Alzheimer’s Prevention (November 29, 2022)

Amazon Books: https://amzn.to/3sXbrMR (to preorder)

The Complete Book of Ketones: A Practical Guide to Ketogenic Diets and Ketone Supplements (2019)  

Amazon Books: https://amzn.to/2AxBcLp 

The Coconut Oil and Low Carb Solution for Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and Other Diseases (2015) 

Amazon Books: https://amzn.to/2BaClJE  

Alzheimer’s Disease: What If There Was a Cure?  The Story of Ketones. (2011, 2 nd edition 2013, 3 rd edition

coming September 2023)  Amazon Books: https://amzn.to/3d4n0HP 

• Call to action for listeners: Follow ketones and Coffee Podcast on Instagram ( https://www.instagram.com/keton.esncoffee ), Youtube ( https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsZZmBEenvZnU8tA1npAODA ), and Twitter ( https://twitter.com/KetonesP ) for updates and new episodes.

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Transcript

0:49

Welcome to the ketones and coffee podcast and welcome to our holiday rerun episode. And we are on our last week of revisiting the best of the best episodes throughout the years we have on ketones and coffee podcast. This has been so amazing so far guys. I am looking forward into doing this more throughout the year. I have had great feedback about it and this is something that can return not just on the holidays. But today, you are in for a treat. For this episode, we are revisiting the interview with Dr. Mary Newport. She is a food addiction professional. Dr. Mary Newport is a board certified pediatrician and a neonatologist with over 30 years of experience. In and international speaker on the benefits of ketones as an alternative fuel for the brain. In addition, Dr. Mary Newport is the author of three books, including Clearly Keto for Healthy Brain Aging. And Alzheimer's prevention. Her groundbreaking research and experience with ketones have had made a great impact, on the subject. In 2008, Dr. Mary Newport implemented a ketogenic nutritional intervention using coconut and medium chain triglyceride oil that drastically improved her husband's early onset Alzheimer's disease. We are a further ado guys. Here is Dr. Mary Newport and her story. Oh, thank you, Lorenz. Thank you so much for having me on your show. Awesome. Dr. Mary, it is my honor to have you on the Ketones and Coffee podcast today. And well, also thank you so much for taking the time to join us and share and to share your inspiring story and mission. When I asked you to come on the show, you were very eager to come on to share your story and mission. And I love your work with, you know, ketones and brain health. It's, you know, it's been truly remarkable as I dig deeper into this side of health and truly remarkable, and I can't wait for our listeners to hear more about it. I must say your book, The Complete Book of Ketones, is a fantastic resource as someone who is passionate discussing the connection between keto, mental health, brain health, and as for our overall health. I find your research to be, you know, right up my alley here, right? Dr. Mary, you know, you, your journey to exploring the benefits of ketones for brain health is, you know, a deeply personal one. I read your story and, you know, as your husband, late husband battled Alzheimer's with, was that Lewy body dementia? Yeah. Louie, body dementia. And until his passing in 2016, I read your book, became clear to me that he experienced a miraculous recovery thanks to the ketogenic nutritional intervention, which was, yeah. And it was for me. Almost miraculous, which, you know, was not prevalent at that time and is not, I think, not widely used today. No, not yet. It's getting there, though. People are finding it, slowly but surely. Yeah, and we all know someone who has been affected by this disease, whether it be a family member, right, or friend, perhaps even ourselves. Your story offers a lot of hope for People answers for many people searching for that solution, like yourself, when you were searching for that, I'm confident that by sharing your experience, we, we can provide valuable insights that will help, you know, our listeners in their own journeys. So I think we have to start. With your story and it's incredibly important conversation to have and I'm grateful to have you here. Dr Newport, could you please share your story with our listeners and tell us more about? Your experience with, you know, ketones and brain health. Okay. Hmm. Well, the story begins actually a little more than 20 years ago. Uh, my husband, Steve was an accountant and he worked for my medical practice from home. He was there to take care of our kids. I'm a newborn specialist and I had to, I got calls constantly to the newborn ICU for emergencies to the delivery room. So he was there for our children and I'm just so grateful to him because he. Allowed me to be a doctor and a mother by agreeing to stay home and take care of our children. So I owe a lot to him. But when he was 51 years old, he started having memory problems and he was somebody that was on a computer all day. With his accounting, he was an avid kayaker. He loved to read. He wasn't somebody you would expect to get Alzheimer's, but he started having memory problems and they just got more and more serious. And when he was 54, he was diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer's disease. And a couple of years later, he could no longer drive. He couldn't even remember how to turn on a computer, you know, much less use a mouse or do anything else on a computer, even though he had spent years. Every day on a computer, it was pretty, it was tragic. And so in 2008, fast forward, he was going downhill very quickly. And I really thought I would probably lose him within the next two or three years. He was forgetting to eat. He, you know, losing weight. He walked very slow, couldn't pick up his feet and run. He had tremors in his hands. And his jaw, when he would try to eat, to speak, he would have tremors. And he couldn't finish sentences. He couldn't even finish the simplest little task. And so things were not looking good at all. And we had two clinical trials become available in our area that, you know, nothing had been available for several years. And so. So, I had them scheduled to try out, do screenings for these clinical trials two days in a row, and they were at two different research centers in our area. So, the night before, I'm on the internet looking at the risks and benefits of the two drugs because we would have to choose if you got accepted into both studies, and I came upon a press release about a medical food that was going to come out about a year later. And they said that it improved the memory and cognition in nearly half of the people with Alzheimer's that took it. And this was just after a single dose. And then they had done another study that was 90 days duration. For some people it was 6 months. And again, almost half of them improved and they maintained their improvement over time. So this sounded very hopeful, but they didn't say what it was or what it did. So I was able to get their patent application online. It's very easy to do that. And I learned that it was medium chain triglyceride oil. And what I knew about that was as a newborn specialist, we had added that MCT oil it's called to the feedings of our tiniest preemies back in the early 1980s. And then they started adding it to infant formulas and it's still an infant formulas today. And. I learned that it was extracted from coconut oil, which is also in virtually every commercial infant formula today because they're trying to provide medium chain triglycerides that are in human breast milk. So I thought, this is all very interesting. And the reason why MCT oil could help somebody with ketones are, I mean, with MCT oil is because the liver partly converts them to ketones regardless of what you eat. And ketones are a fuel for brain cells. All cells in our body need fuel. You know, virtually all need fuel to operate. Especially our brain. It's very active. It requires a lot of energy and on a typical diet here in the U. S. and probably in Canada, you know, most people eat a higher carb, a little bit lower fat diet. They're not eating ketogenic or low carb diets usually. And in that situation, your body and especially your brain run almost completely off glucose. There might be a little bit of ketones in there, but unless you fast overnight for 12 hours or so, most people don't have a, you know, significant level of ketones in their blood. So the reason why this could help somebody with Alzheimer's is because in Alzheimer's, there's a problem of diabetes of the brain. It's very similar to type 2 diabetes in that. Usually, cells require insulin to get or directly or indirectly to get into the cell, to get glucose into the cell to use as fuel. And with insulin resistance, the cells aren't operating normally that way. The receptors are not allowing glucose to get into the brain very well and into brain cells and Alzheimer's. So it's a big problem. However, ketones. are easily taken up. They don't require insulin. They cross the blood brain barrier, get into the brain very easily. They're taken up very easily into cells. And, you know, cells can switch over immediately from using glucose to ketones. And there's a researcher in Canada, where you're from, he's in Quebec, Dr. Stephen Cunane at Sherbrooke University. And he has used ketone and glucose PET scans and hundreds of adults of all ages, healthy and people with mild cognitive impairment, which precedes Alzheimer's people with Alzheimer's. And he's been able to show that ketones are taken up normally. In the affected areas of the Alzheimer brain, so these cells can use ketones. And he's even been able to show that when you take MCT oil, it increases ketones and provides more energy to the brain. So he's actually been able to show that this. And then he and others have done studies, you know, with people, you know, showing that they do have cognitive improvement and it can be sustained for at least six months. His studies go out to six months. So this, all of this evolved actually after this happened with my husband. So back to 2008 I learned. about diabetes of the brain and that the brain cells may be able to use ketones and That MCT oil could do that and that MCT oil came from coconut oil and I knew I could get coconut oil so that's why I picked that and so I'm learning about this around 1 a. m. And then the morning and he was scheduled at 9 a. m. to be at this first screening. So I didn't have a chance to do anything about it. So he basically had a day before and a day after starting coconut oil testing at a research center, which was amazing. So. He goes for the test and he scored very poorly on a test called the mini mental status exam. He needed 16 out of 30 points and he only scored 14 points and we were very disappointed. And the doctor had him draw a clock and I'm going to try to show you this clock that he drew. So, I don't think anybody would look at that and say, Oh, it's a clock. It's very disorganized, a few little circles, a few numbers. And the doctor said, well, he's on the verge of severe Alzheimer's and that's what I was seeing at home, you know, with his inability to do so many things. So I thought, what do we have to lose? I'm going to pick up some coconut oil on the way home, you know, we stopped at a health food store and then I was able to figure out. You know, how much medium chain triglycerides were in coconut oil and how much to give him based on what the dose they were using for the medical food, which was 20 grams or 20 mls of MCT oil. So this was seven teaspoons of coconut oil. So it was a lot of coconut oil. It doesn't have as much ketones, obviously as MCT oil, because MCT oil is extracted from it. There are other fats in coconut oil. So the next day he was scheduled again, this time at one in the afternoon, and that allowed me time to give him this in the morning for breakfast around 9 AM. And, um, he got the. A little over two tablespoons of coconut oil. We went for the screening and this time he scored 18 points and he qualified for the study that morning. Yeah. So this is the very next day, you know, three hours after he took the coconut oil three, about four hours after he had this four point improvement in a score and we weren't in the same location. So the things that he got right were the season, the day of the week. The floor we were on in the institution and the town that, that we were in, which was different, you know, so, you know, he. Gain four points and he qualified for the study. So I thought art. Was this just really good luck? Was it prayers? Was it you know, or was it really this and I thought okay? I'm gonna explore this and we're gonna keep it going and so every morning thereafter I gave him, you know a little over two tablespoons of coconut oil for breakfast and but then even the next day I thought You know that this medical food was going to be one dose in the morning but they showed in their studies that the ketone levels peaked at about 90 minutes and We're pretty much gone after three hours, and I thought well your brain needs fuel 24 7 So, you know, what if we give it to him throughout the day, you know at various meals Just start cooking with it and giving it to him. Maybe that could help ketones coming to his brain, you know Um, so that's what we did. And really over the next four or five days, he had, he improved so dramatically already that we looked at each other and said, our life has changed. Something has happened here. And you know, so we continued it. I started contacting well, Dr. Richard Veatch at the NIH. He. was the world expert on ketones. He had been studying ketones since his career, since he was a PhD student at Oxford in the 1960s. And he had started intensively studying ketones as potential therapy in the 1990s. And he was developing a ketone ester. And I had gotten somehow his phone number. I think it was on Wikipedia. And I called him and he actually answered the phone himself. I was just really shocked. You know, so at first I asked him, theoretically, could, do you think coconut oil could help? You know, and he hadn't really heard about that. He didn't, I think he didn't realize that MCT oil was extracted from coconut oil, but he had heard about MCT oil and the inventor of that idea, Dr. Sam Henderson, had called him a few years before to ask him about MCT oil and he said, Oh, I don't think the levels would be high enough. You know, the ketone ester that he was making, which is actually out on the market now since 2018, he, he, you could easily get 10 times the levels of ketones that you can get with MCT oil. And my husband actually, two years later, was the first person with Alzheimer's or any disorder to get to try the ketone ester, Dr. Veach's ester in a clinical trial. Pilot study of one person. And it did get published in 2015 and Alzheimer's and dementia that the journal of the American or the Alzheimer's association. So it, you know, he, but Steve, yeah, he just steadily improved. He improved, you know, things like his gait. He started walking normally, you know, by about two months he could pick up his feet and run again. His tremors disappeared. He talked more smoothly. He could finish his thoughts. He's recognized family members that he didn't recognize a year earlier and just many things. And he had a visual disturbance. This one was one of the most interesting things to me about three or four months after we started doing this. And we had already added MCT oil too, so we were adding dew and coconut MCT. He was getting two or three tablespoons several times a day, so quite a lot of it. But at about three and a half months, he said, you know, I can read again. And I said, huh? I said, why couldn't you read? And he said, well, he said, when he would look at a page, like in a book, that the words, he said, it was like they went into pixels and they started moving around on the page. He said it was sort of like what you see in your TV when there's satellite breakup, you know, that something like that would happen and he couldn't read, but that stopped. It just suddenly stopped. And thereafter he could read, you know, I tested him numerous times and he could read. He said it wasn't happening. And to me, that was quite interesting. It was probably part of his Lewy body dementia. Donated his brain and he, we found out that he had mainly Alzheimer's, but also Lewy bodies all through parts of the brain. So he improved enough that he was able to start volunteering at the hospital that I worked at. He worked in the supply warehouse helping to deliver supplies and he put stickers on supplies and that kind of thing. It was. They think they put up with a lot and they had to supervise them, but he, it made him feel useful again. You know, it was so important and he had been very depressed and that lifted and his anxiety improved. And you know, I'll keep talking. Yeah, it's incredible. Maybe you should ask a question. No, I just love. So, just listening to you and talk about the remarkable improvements that you have been experiencing. Why don't we just call it type 3 diabetes to make it easier for everybody? Yeah. Type 3 diabetes. It must be. It's not type 1. It's really a combination of type 1 and type 2 because there's also insulin deficiency in the brain. Yeah. And, you know. And essentially, the brain affects everything. That says a lot about. How energy intensive the brain can be, right? Amber O'Horn talked about this on her keynote. She said that the brain requires 20 25 percent of the energy that we take, which is very energy intensive. And you talked about the improvements that your late husband had experienced. And in the beginning, you You started him with, you know, MCT oil, coconut oil. You said in just two and a half months, he showed positive signs and his test scores showed positive results. Plus, he didn't report any brain deterioration. And in my view, it was nothing short of a miracle because considering he was deteriorating at an alarming speed before that, right? And at one point, you said, you know, he went back to work, which is truly amazing. That's amazing. Yeah, it was amazing. And a lot of people, you know, hearing this now, maybe not aware that MCT or ketones can do this for them. It's really giving a lot of people hope because at the time the prognosis for Alzheimer's was thought to Progressive disease that starts slowly and progressively worsens and it's poorly understood, right? Yeah, and most doctors still believe that. I mean, they still believe and they still tell their patients because they haven't seen this yet or maybe they've heard about it, but maybe they haven't had a patient that came to them and said, look, I'm doing, and they could document that they were doing better. But there are other physicians out there. Yeah, I went to the metabolic health summit out in California last May. And there were over 300 physicians there, and I thought, Oh, this is very hopeful, you know, to have this many physicians and the potential for ketones for so many different disorders, many of them affecting the brain, you know, anxiety and depression, psychiatrists are using it. There are a couple of books now, Dr. Chris Palmer, you know, is written about, it's called brain energy, you know, and I've heard him speak and, you know. No, I'm a little bit met him, you know, at different conferences, but he, he's had really good success, you know, with people with, with bipolar disorder, depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, even which, and all those things have in common, they have areas of the brain that don't take up glucose normally into the cells and that's how ketones could potentially help. And, you know, um, these ketogenic ketones are also anti inflammatory and, and, and. Most of these brain diseases, inflammation is a major part of the problem as well. So it can help calm down inflammation in the brain ketones. I'm curious, when you began your research to help your husband, there was, you know, there's no, there was no promising treatments for Alzheimer's you talked about on your book. And also, I don't know if. Yeah. There's truth in this. I heard that when a patient is diagnosed with Alzheimer's, the advice of the doctors to the families are basically, you have to prepare the will, right? Mm-Hmm. You have to prepare everything. Prepare everything financially, because mm-hmm. It's, uh, again, slowly progressive disease that, you know, genetic. Right. What did you hope to find? On your search and how did you begin exploring the benefits of the key of ketones for brain health knowing that? Hey guys, let me tell you about this delivery service that's been a total game changer for my lifestyle Did you know that it's now possible to get local fresh groceries delivered right out your doorstep? Well, Instacart gives you unlimited grocery delivery for one low monthly fee. And if I can avoid buying non keto friendly items from supermarkets who psychs you into buying unhealthy foods, plus if it saves me a lot of time and money, sign me up! Instacart is hand selected by shoppers based on your preferences, so no more rock hard avocados, and they will keep your eggs safe too. And Instacart will find everything you usually buy, and get smart suggestions for new items. And you can get your first order today delivered for free when you purchase over 35 by following the link on the show notes below to let Instacart know that I sent you and to help to support the show. Instacart. Never step foot in the grocery store again. Yeah. Yeah. Well, once this happened, you know, when I understood it, I recalled from medical school that during starvation, you break down fat and that ketones provide energy to your brain. So remember that was something that was discovered in the 1960s. So when I read this patent application, I started having little flashbacks, you know, to what I had learned and, you know, the MCT oil was converted to ketones in the liver. I had also heard that in medical school and then using it as a physician, I prescribed it routinely to add to feedings of our tiny, the tiniest preemies. These are babies under two pounds that would survive and go home. And, you know, at that point I wasn't thinking about it as far as ketones. For energy for their brain. I was thinking about it helped them grow better Faster and they would get home sooner and it was something that was in breast milk So, you know, I just had that little bit of background and I think because I was a neonatologist a newborn specialist And had used MCT all. That's why I knew what it was when I read the patent application and I knew it was possible to get it because this was a medical food that wasn't gonna come out for another year. They were doing, you know, seeking FDA recognition as a medical food. You have to do certain studies to be able to make claims like that. And they were, these studies were in progress. So, you know, I thought. Well, hospitals can get it. Maybe I can get it, but I knew I could get coconut oil anywhere in the health food stores. So, you know, basically, but I hadn't really thought about ketones until that. It was just, just a chance press release, you know, that night, May 21st, 20, yeah, 2008, but then it was became, my whole life became ketones. And I thought, you know, if my husband improved, Other people will improve and they're, at that point, they were saying there were 35 million people in the world with dementia, most of it Alzheimer's. And I thought, I have a whole lot of people to tell about this. How can you shut up about this? Right, how can I shut up? This isn't something I can just keep to myself. And then I had to learn as much as I possibly could from it. And Dr. Veach was great because well, two weeks after Steve started taking the coconut oil, he drew another clock. Can you see that? Yeah. So it's a circle. It's got a whole bunch of spokes. It's got all the numbers. It's not neat and tidy, but it's a lot better. And then. Like a month after that, he drew a little bit neater clock. And it doesn't happen like that. It's usually No. worsens. It usually goes together. It gets worse. And I faxed it to Dr. Veach. And he called me and he said, This is unexpected. He said, I really didn't think low levels of ketones would help somebody with Alzheimer's. So he was intrigued and he started sending me papers. You know that he and others had written about ketones as potential therapeutic for the brain Hypothesis papers he put me in touch with he had three of his associates call me These were all these were men that were up in age three out of the four of them have passed away now including dr. Veach, but dr. George Cahill called me he Was the one who discovered that during starvation, you're, you break down fat and you make ketones and that's how your brain survives that it can provide two thirds of the fuel to your brain. And I got to talk to him. I even spent a day with him and Dr. Beach going to Congress. We went to the house of representatives to talk to my local representative about getting funding for this, you know, for his ketone Esther and for studying ketones. And then Dr. Theodore van Italy called me. He wrote the forward for the complete book of ketones. at age 99. He passed away just before his 100th birthday. You know, he was writing and publishing at 99. He knew something about his nutrition. He's a physician that was a nutrition researcher, and he was intensely interested in ketones. Dr. Sammy Hasham, who is now 93, and he is still, he's still doing well. He has a ketone. beta hydroxybutyrate triglyceride that is working its way towards recognition as a medical food doing some pilot studies and that type of thing. So, you know, I got to actually talk to these people and I got to meet all three of them. And to me, that was just amazing because these are the pioneers. These are the people who laid the groundwork for. People now who I call the rising stars of ketone research. Dominic D'Agostino, you know, just so many others, you know, who now have become involved in ketone research and getting this message out and it's It was very slow in the beginning. You know, I started with letter writing campaigns. Sandra Day O'Connor, her husband, had Alzheimer's, and she was on the Alzheimer's study group of the Alzheimer's Association. She was the first one I wrote to. It was probably a six page letter that And I was encouraging them to study it, you know. I wasn't saying, oh, you need to just broadcast it. Well, I kind of did tell them they should broadcast it to everybody now, because this was the food that was available on the shelf. People did not need to wait for a medical food to come out a year later. It was already available and it was just food. It wasn't a dangerous, harmful drug with terrible potential side effects. But you know, but I did make the point, I know my husband's only one case. You know, and but more study needs to be done and please get your medical, your physicians and your researchers on this and, and I wrote to so many people, politicians, the media, you know, all the major cable channels. I mean, everybody and nobody responded. It was. You would think, but nobody responded. It was, and it was terrible. Yeah. Yeah. I went to adults. Go ahead. This is all great. Well, I want to go back to you at that time. How were you processing that? Because this is all happening around you and you meeting all of these people, right? What did it mean for you in your research going forward and how were you processing that you're, you know, that there's something here, but you just want to tell everybody, right? I just want to tell everybody. Well, I, all I could think about was who to contact and how to get the message out. And about two months after this happened with my husband, I mean, he had improved so much. And my family confirmed it. He recognized him. He saw, they said, Oh my gosh, he's so much better than a year ago. I thought, okay, I'm not out of my mind. So I wrote an article. It was just a self published article. My plan was to take it to the Alzheimer's association conference, which was in July that year, two months after in Chicago. And I sent them the little article that I was going to distribute in their exhibit hall at their conference. And I arranged to have a table, they agreed to it, they accepted my payment, everything. I had 1, 500 copies of my article printed up. I called it a case study. It was, what if there was a cure for Alzheimer's and no one knew it was the title of it. And it was a case report about my husband and what had happened and explained, you know, what we've talked about. And then they, three days before Everything's ready. It's all printed up in Chicago. They said, well, we changed our mind. We're not going to let you have a table And you cannot distribute it you can come to the conference, but you can't distribute the your your article and i'm like what the heck, you know So we handed out quite a few of them in chicago I did go to the conference my sister and her husband came and they hung out with steve and my sister She passed a lot out on the street and we took them to health food stores in Chicago and I slipped them to about maybe 200 people at the conference. Dr. Newport, if you had to guess, why did they stop that from happening, do you think? Well, there are two possibilities. One, the, the mate, the company with the medical food. They also had an exhibit there and they, so, and I actually talked to him a few times while I was there. My table is going to literally be like right across from their booth. It was interesting. And I don't know if that had anything to do with it or, you know, they told me this needs to go. Something like this needs to go through the peer reviewed process, you know, so somebody. You know, got upset about it somewhere, um, that I would just distribute an article instead of going through the routine and, you know, uh, that's my problem with it, Dr. Newport. Sorry. Yeah. That's my problem with it because I know it's not peer reviewed, but we're looking at case studies after case studies with people that are actually showing that, you know, isn't, doesn't that, you know, doesn't that give at least. You know, exploration, like, right, right, right. Why not? You know, why can't people read about it, investigate it for themselves and decide if this is something they want to do. It's just food. It's just, it's not like it's, yeah. Like you said, it's not like it's drugs. It's not a harmful drug. You know, drugs are toxic. All of them have side effects. Virtually all of them have side effects. Sometimes they can be severe, but this is the food, you know, coconut oil has been consumed by, they estimate a billion people in the tropical parts of the world eat coconut oil as a staple in their diet. You know, it's just a routine part of their diet and has been for millennia, you know, that humans. You know, we evolved in tropical parts of the world and coconut is just a wonderful It's got so much, you know, it has coconut water. It's got the meat. It's got the oil It's got a huge amount of nutrition in it. And you know, there are you know areas where it's a large part It can be a third of the diet, you know There were some islands in the I'm trying to think of exactly where they were but in Asia That two thirds of their diet was coconut and even their animals ate coconut, you know, but they measured, they weighed them, they did their blood pressure, they check their cholesterol levels, triglycerides. And they were normal. They were normal. They didn't, they weren't dying of heart disease and they weren't having serious problems from it. This is what they lived on and this is what they evolved eating, you know, over time. And so it's, it just kind of, it blows my mind that they would object, you know, to having that. And I, you know, they're all about developing drugs. That's their biggest thrust and their biggest donors. And I learned a couple of years later, Dr. Sam Henderson, I mentioned earlier, who invented the idea of using MCT oil. He told me that they had stopped allowing nutrition based companies to even have exhibits at the conference at that point. What's the threat to them, Dr. Mary? It's just the bottom line. Yeah. I don't know. I mean, You know, well, I guess multi millions invested in drugs, you know, they just the idea that a food, but these are, this is like, yeah, it's, to me, really, it's upsetting. I'm trying to get to them this year again. I've been going to their conference now for six or seven years. Again, I kind of didn't go for a few years. I was very upset, but, you know, Dr. Mary had a similar situation where I had to, and I stopped cold calling psychiatrists. Just, I was calling psychiatrists around the area talking about this new book by Dr. Christopher Palmer about brain energy and talking about them and most of them are Really resistant to it. I sent a lot. I found that. Yeah, I've had patients hand my article to the doctor and say we'd like to do this and or we want you to know about this. Some of them won't even take the paper from them to read it, you know, and then others do. And what I find is when doctors, when they have a patient that they could see with their own eyes, it's, it That's when they think, Oh, maybe there's something to this. And then there are others who are just open minded. Maybe they have a bigger background or interest in nutrition. Doctors get very little medical school education in nutrition. I had three hours one afternoon on diet. That was it. You get plenty of biochemistry and. You know, how, you know, at the molecular level, a lot of diseases, doctor, a lot of diseases roots from diet. It does. And diet, it's, I mean, just diabetes alone. I mean, that's, it's so rampant. It has been greatly increasing since we were told around 1980 to eat a low fat diet. And then these companies started developing all these fat free. You know, highly processed foods loaded with sugar fructose, all of this, and, you know, diabetes, obesity have just escalated that escalated, you know, since all that happened, even preschool children, 41 percent of them are obese. It's, and this is children in the WIC program, women's infants and children's program, you know, they get, you know, food, you know, from the government. It's just, it's tragic. And dementia has escalated. right along with it. And dementia is very closely tied to diabetes, this diabetes of the brain, you know, type three diabetes that we talked about. And you know, diet can reverse type two diabetes. And it can help better control even type one diabetes by eating a low carb diet. One of the organizations that has come around is the American Diabetes Association. They used to recommend a 65 percent carb diet, low fat diet, you know, adequate protein and you know, people who are, who have diabetes, they tend to, especially eating like that, need more and more insulin while they need more medication and then eventually they need insulin if they have type two diabetes. But, there are doctors, Dr. Eric Westman comes to mind, he's at Duke University and he has been using the Atkins diet, now it's a low carb, it's a ketogenic diet. And he has successfully helped reverse over 4, 000 people with diabetes type 2 that have been able to get off medication and off insulin. He cuts their insulin in half the day that they start the diet. And then he helps them slowly wean off their medications. And many people are off their medications in 6 or 8 weeks. And that's, you know, the process. As mainstream, why does everybody not know this with the American Diabetes Association? They've published guidelines in 2019 where they reverse and now, you know, in these guidelines, they reported a number of different low carb studies, Mediterranean diet, the mind. diet, but low carb and very low carb diets, they now say there is evidence to support using this for diabetes. And I was a little shocked when I read this, but happy, you know, about it because at least one major organization has done a turnaround. It's not real obvious on their website though. It's you have to read this paper that was published in 2019 with their guidelines on it to get the full scoop about it. But. Yeah, they basically say the amount of carbohydrate you eat is varies from individual to individual consult with your doctor, but they don't say eat a low carb diet Yeah, and all you need at least are in the right direction when all they need to do is to Remove their hand from the stove right when you know that yes The root cause healing when you have all you need to do was to just remove your hand from the fire, right? I don't understand it. I want to be able to one day point at one thing that started everything that started this whole, you know, fat is bad for you or red meat. Another factor for increasing carbohydrate intake is the fear of red meat. Because when you don't eat a lot of meat, you're upping your carbohydrate intake. Yeah. Well, I'm actually working on a project on that. If I turn into a book, I'm hoping to write up a paper about it. But looking at the very roots, where was the idea that cholesterol causes heart disease? And how did fat come into this equation and it actually starts in the early 1900s with animal studies, mostly rabbits, but they all kinds of animals, and they were trying to figure out why they were starting to see heart attacks. You know, people have heart attacks, they kind of forgot that smoking could have been part of the problem. A lot of people started smoking, especially World War One, the, you know, that it just started escalating and just grew after that. But, you know, there were other things happening to like Crisco, which was hydrogenated shortening came along around 1911 and then in the next like 10 to 20 years, margarine's hydrogenated margarine started. In And, you know, their competitors were butter and lard and that's what people were cooking with. You know, butter and lard and beef tallow, which is the fat from the beef. And so these companies, you know, intensively, you know, put out intensive campaigns, promoting their products. They were cheaper, you know, and, you know, telling people, lard is bad, coconut oil is bad. Not many people were using coconut oil then maybe two or 3%, you know, but butter was everywhere. So butter and, and lard became bad and Crisco and margarine were what you should eat and it became very prevalent in U. S. households. You know, I was born in 1952 and my mother cooked with Crisco all the time and we had margarine, we didn't have butter. You know, so it was very prevalent. So in the fifties is when they started intensively looking at fat and cholesterol. Dr. Ancel Keys is one of the main people and there's so many stories about him. I'm taking apart his work and, you know, it really, his work is what this low fat diet stemmed from, but in his studies that he did in the 1950s, I'm actually. Finding that, well he studied hydrogenated coconut oil for one thing, which is almost 100 percent saturated fat. The levels didn't increase the way he developed equations to predict how saturated fat would affect your cholesterol level. The predictions didn't bear out. It didn't increase it, and he even cited another group from 1957 who had published studies where they would put people on a diet that was 40 percent hydrogenated coconut oil for four weeks to standardize their diet before they would Test another oil. Their cholesterol levels were identical. I mean they didn't budge for four weeks. And this was hydrogenated coconut oil. So he said in the study That, that apparently the medium chain triglycerides shouldn't really be counted as saturated fat. And then there's another fat, it's C18 stearic acid, which is very prominent in like beef and certain meats. And he said, this one doesn't seem to follow the rules either. He did, he made these rules, but then certain things didn't follow it. So beef tallow didn't. Increase cholesterol, you know, serum cholesterol. Yeah. So he said, well, and it's in COA butter too. So he said, well, cocoa butter doesn't seem to increase your cholesterol. So he decided that steric acid shouldn't be used in the equation for saturated fat. That doesn't really leave much. It leaves like palmitic acid as the main thing in other oils and fats. So, and then, let's see, there were a couple of other, so beef Tao and coconut oil. Oh, butter. He said butter would only increase your cholesterol by like one and a half milligrams per deciliter, you know, and like a typical cholesterol, like under 200 is good. So one and a half out of 200, that's nothing. And your cholesterol level easily fluctuates by that, like that much in 24 hours. So he said, we don't really need to worry about butter, but people still, they got the word saturated fat. Yeah. You know, from this equation that he had developed, and they didn't know all that or forgot about it or whatever, you know, and then saturated fat became evil, and then eventually all fat became evil. Yeah. And, and it goes deep and all the, it goes deep. Deep. And all these studies. Yeah, it's all these studies. Dr. Newport, it's unfortunate to have to go back. To 1900s just to explain to an individual why this is happening, right? Right. Yeah. And, you know, I also heard something about Dr. Ancel Keys about him eating a high saturated fat diet of steak and bacon. Yeah. He did. He ate plenty of meat. He ate plenty of meat. It doesn't make sense. Yeah. It doesn't make sense. Well, and all the studies too, like the American Heart Association, they're the, to me, the number one culprit in spreading this, perpetuating this low fat diet myth. The studies that they cite were done in like Canada, they were done in Europe. But areas where there are trans fats that were very prominent in the diet and, you know, they were counted like they would put lard and margarine and, and beef fat. I mean, they put these together in the same category when they were analyzing the diet to say what people were on. You know, and they didn't know yet that trans fats were harmed, but they were saturated fats because hydrogenation saturates the fats. That's what it does. But it also deforms some of the molecules in the fat and it makes some of these trans fats that are not normal for us to use in our cell membranes and everything else. But the diet, the studies were done with, in people who were eating trans fats. That's fair. And, you know, so. Doctor, that's fair. But they forget that. They forget all that. That's fair that they didn't know trans fats, right? Right. But the fact that. But they do now. They do now. But the fact that when there are studies coming up that opposes cholesterol is bad. Right. What do they do? They shut it down. They don't fund it. They shut it down. Yeah, they shut it down. That's my problem. Yeah, so I've been looking at these coconut oil studies. They do another kind of screwy thing Where there was an article published in 2020 that really trashed coconut oil. It was in Circulation. It was American Heart Association Journal, and they had 16 studies. They were from 1985 Until about 2018, I think was the last one, or maybe 2016. And they, instead of reporting what was the result for cholesterol levels for people in the coconut group from before they started the coconut oil to the end of the coconut oil, they only compared them to the other oils that they were studying. You know, if another oil improved cholesterol more than coconut oil did. It, they reported as increasing cholesterol, even if the people taking coconut oil had lower cholesterol, it would look like a positive. It's really complicated, but you know, they have a graph showing, so I, I got every single article, you know, and I've read through all of these. And when you actually plot out the people who were just taking coconut oil there, you know, before and after, it's nothing like what they reported, like in the, some of the short term studies, it goes up by like less than 5%. If you average them out the cholesterol level, but these are three to five week studies. By the time you get out to eight to 15 weeks, it's back to baseline. I mean, you know, the average difference was basically zero. And then a two year study, it, you know, of coconut oil and a hundred people took coconut oil. A hundred people took sunflower oil at the end of the two years. They had almost identical cholesterol levels to where they started out two years earlier, you know. So in the short term, if you throw a massive amount, a large amount of anything into your diet, there's going to be some metabolic change, you know, for a period of time. But, you know, maybe weeks, but even some of the short term studies, there were a couple of short term studies where the cholesterol went down in the people, the average cholesterol went down, you know, so, and then individuals vary extremely much. They only look at group averages. They don't look at what happens to individuals. And I found a graph from Ancel Keys from the 1950s again. He didn't have the graph in, you know, showing the individuals, but he had a table showing their results over about seven or eight weeks. And, uh, he, basically, I plotted them out, and these were men who were schizophrenic. They were all living in the same facility. They were eating exactly the same food. They were put on the same menu because they were going to be in the study. And these men, there were men that had cholesterol levels of 300 milligrams per deciliter and 160, like half, cholesterol level and everything in between. And they're, from week to week, they changed drastically and differently. You know, so each individual is so different that, you know, they went from eating a higher fat diet to an extremely low fat diet, 9 percent fat. And their cholesterol levels, almost everybody dropped it. Not everybody even dropped in that case. You know, so these studies, they look at a group average. They don't look at what happens to individual people. You know, I think that is a big problem with a lot of research now, you know, like MCT oil. You know, there's a thing about ApoE4, people who have this ApoE4 gene, who are more likely to get Alzheimer's. When they did that first study from that MCT oil, they found that when they separated the people who are ApoE4 from those that weren't, they said the people with ApoE4 didn't respond to MCT oil. Well, my husband was an ApoE4. And he did respond. So I asked Sam Henderson and he said, well, actually half of the people did respond, it's just when we averaged them together, that the average showed no response, but individuals did respond. Something as important as Alzheimer's, I think it is important to, you know, report how many people actually had an improvement. It's reasonable, I think. You know what? One last point for cholesterol and that whole hypothesis. Everything that doesn't support their hypothesis, they don't care to publish it. That's what I've heard from the literature that I've read. Very true. And so anything that comes from that group, I don't really Take seriously when, you know, the seven countries study where they, Ancel Keys picked out the seven countries that supports his hypothesis is one. Um, and there were 22, he didn't plot the others. So really, you know, we're thinking of what sort of. We'll push this message forward, right? You know, your books are great, you know, coming on to show you your case studies, you know, collaborating with others, doctors and scientists. You know, awesome spreading the word here coming on the podcast is great. You know, I want to be, let's go back to MCT oil and implementing that. You mentioned that a portion of MCTs are converted by the liver into ketones. Um, can you tell us how much is it typically converted and how these ketones are utilized by the brain? So, because also that's, you know, does it still provide the same benefits to the brain even if the individual is not in metabolic ketosis? Yes. Right. Right. No matter what you eat, your liver will convert part of this to ketones. It's better. The levels, there's a couple of studies now showing that it's better if you eat a lower carb meal, you know, when you're taking the MCT and I really feel that eating lower carb is important if you're serious about wanting to, especially dealing with Alzheimer's or something like that. And it doesn't have to be super straight. It can be reasonable. But so C, there's several different medium chain triglycerides and there's argument about which are the medium chain triglycerides. But C6 is one. It's not very prominent in, you know, coconut oil or oils. It's very bitter, but it's the most, probably the most ketogenic. C8. It's in like there are a number of products out that are just C8 and C8 is very ketogenic. It's most of it will convert to ketones. C10 is not as ketogenic. That's how many carbons are in the chain. So there's 10 carbons in the fatty acid chain. But. It has other properties. It has anticonvulsant properties. It's actually on par with some anticonvulsant medications. And there's a product out, it was put out from the U. K. called K Vita, where they, it's 80 percent C10 and 20 percent C8. And usually they're reversed, you know, in standard MCT oils, that C8 is higher. But it's for, you know, people with diabetes, or with epilepsy, to help control seizures. They're using that, including that in their diet. C8 and C10, there's a new study out this past year that astrocytes in the brain take up, they prefer C8 and C10, these medium chain triglycerides, as fuel to beta hydroxybutyrate, but neurons prefer beta hydroxybutyrate directly, getting it directly. So, it kind of answers an interesting question because the exogenous ketone supplements, ketone salts, ketone esters, you can get the actual ketone that you make from fat in your body, beta hydroxybutyrate, in these supplements. And they first came out 2016 with the salts and 2018 with the ester. And one question has been, maybe I shouldn't mix, take a MCT, a ketone supplement at the same time. Well, I think maybe you should, because you'll feed your astrocytes with the MCTs. They like that, and the neurons will get beta hydroxybutyrate from the esters. Astrocytes can convert C8, C10, and C12. We know, which is lauric acid, half of coconut oil, can convert it to ketones and they can shuttle ketones to the neurons. They, astrocytes are cells that feed the neurons, they nourish the neurons. They help maintain electrolyte balance in the neurons and that type of thing. So, I think there's value. I'm going to be doing a lot more of that. So if you want to check out the full video, I'll put it in the description box. And I'll see you in the next video. Eight years past that he, the beginning of the end was he had a seizure. He fell straight back, had a terrible seizure. I was at the hospital and he stopped breathing. He turned blue. He was still blue when I got home and he became completely dependent after that. And it's a common complication of Alzheimer's and Lewy body dementia. They have seizures. So some people have said, do you think the ketone ester caused it? I'm like, no, no, it did not cause it. It was Alzheimer's and Lewy body dementia. So then he did pass away from Alzheimer's disease, but he was late. He was already quite, you know, far. On the verge of severe Alzheimer's when we started this and I thought, you know, if we can get to people before they have it, think about like, like I started doing all of this right away when he did, because I have Alzheimer's on both sides of my family and I thought if it could help somebody who has Alzheimer's, it may be able to prevent it, you know, so I've been taking a preventive strategy My book Clearly Keto, that's really what it's all about, trying to prevent, you know, brain aging, enjoy healthy, you know, healthy brain aging and prevent Alzheimer's, not prevent aging, but prevent Alzheimer's, and we have no choice about aging, but we can do it better, you know, and, but I've had some people now that I've been following for years that are doing a combination of ketogenic strategies that have done quite well. There was a lady in Germany. I have a third edition of this book coming out in September. It's So she's going to be in it. There's several people that will be in it. Her name's Helga Rora, and we met her in Greece when I got to present at a conference there about coconut and MCT1. And she had Lewy body dementia. She had just been diagnosed within a year, and she was at the conference. Um, and, you know, I told her about the coconut oil. She came to my presentation, and she started doing that. And then she added a ketogenic diet. She started doing more exercise, and she wrote the foreword for the German version of my book that came out a couple years later. And she's on Facebook. I communicate with her all the time. She should have passed a long time ago from Lewy body dementia, you know, but she's still going strong. This is 12, 13 years later, and she writes books. She speaks about dementia. Very interesting. And then there's a man. In California, Joe and his wife Carol, Joe was diagnosed, three different neurologists believed he had Alzheimer's in 2012 and he was 84 at the time and he, his wife, a friend told her about coconut and MCT and she contacted me and she started doing this with him and he had. Fairly immediate improvement in his symptoms and, you know, the kind of progress like Steve, he improved over some time. And then when ketone salts came out in 2016, she added that to his diet and he improved even more. And then the ketone ester in 2018, she added that and he improved even more and I got to meet them. He would carry on just a perfectly wonderful conversation. He was right up on the politics and the news and, you know, just a delightful man. He'd been an elite swimmer. He had eaten a Mediterranean diet his whole life, and, you know, he was a surfer until he was 89. He was out in California, and he, you know, was doing very well, and his last two neurology evaluations, they said he had mild cognitive impairment, which precedes Alzheimer's. So he actually improved and maintained that over quite a long time, and sadly he had a surgery in the fall. And he didn't recover from it and he ended up passing away from, he was 94 and he passed away from heart failure related to old age. He had a pacemaker battery that died, passed out basically, and his heart didn't really recover very well. So, but I think he may be the first survivor of Alzheimer's. Wow. Yeah. Wow. This is a couple of other stories, you know, must be smiling down on you. And yeah, yeah. And his wife is she's been spreading the message and she's, you know, becoming even a stronger advocate, you know, now she's spending her time, you know, writing a book and talking to as many people she can about it. This is, this has become your drive, the driving force of your life, your passion, everything comes to this now. And there's a lot of, you know, a lot of work to do, but if there's one person like the woman that you met at the conference. If there was one person that's willing to listen to you and resonate with your story, this is all for, this is all, this is not for nothing. This is life saving for a lot of people. Even though the standard care or the mainstream medicine doesn't recognize it, I believe that one day it will be. If you just keep, if you just keep talking about it, you know, heal a lot more people and, you know, just. Put this, give this an, as an option for a lot of people. And that's the best thing. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, back in 2008, I felt like a lonely messenger for all of this. Dominic D'Agostino, I met him later that year and he, that became his life's work. I was so happy that he was inspired. I thought I'd find a researcher in Chicago at the Alzheimer's conference, but he was right here in Tampa near me. And then, you know, now there are. Really tens of thousands of people, you know, thanks to companies that develop ketone salts this type of thing They're also been getting the message out big time. And you know, so and you People doing podcasts and trying to get this message out. So more and more people are hearing about it. I the Alzheimer's Association Surprisingly has come around somewhat since 2017. They've had usually at least one session on ketones Um, at their annual conference, um, Dr. Kuhnane has gotten to present there a number of times. I, in July, I am going to be presenting two posters. One is on a personalized plan based on what my friend Joe, you know, was doing and other people that are improving that are sustaining it for years, you know, combining overnight fasting and exercise and coconut and MCT, lower carb diet, eating more whole foods. And exogenous ketone supplements and, you know, that you can potentially sustain improvement. So I have a poster about that. And then I've collected case reports, hundreds of them over the years, and there was a batch of them that I collected, like every single email that I received about it. From 2008 to 2014 and I collected 360 emails and 288 of'em were people who had some hit Alzheimer's or dementia or some other type of memory problem. And so I have a poster about those 288 people and what types of improvements they reported, you know, whether they improved or not. And what types of improvements they reported. So it's peer reviewed. So I have two peer reviewed posters that are going to be presented at the Alzheimer's Association Conference in Amsterdam in July. Awesome. And then I hope to write a paper, too, from that. I thought if they accept the poster, maybe they'll publish the paper. Well, I'm, I'm forever indebted to, you know, having you here because what you're telling us right now, saving a lot of, I believe you're saving a lot of people's lives here and giving a lot of people hope, even though, you know, compliance may be a factor, however, you know, giving families an option is huge. For yeah, for people and just that's, that's my, that's what I'm, that's my thing. Just give people options as long as they have the options, right? Everything, everything on the table, right? Um, if they know about it, they have the option to think about it. Yeah. That's the best thing to do. Yeah, and you know, a lot of people, how do I get started with this? Well, some people think they'll take one teaspoon of coconut oil and they'll be cured, you know, no It's a patience, perseverance, consistency It's over time and it's you have you basically need to keep doing it because some of the improvements will go away if you stop Doing that and I do have a website I don't know if you want to post a link or do you want me to say it? I could talk to you all day. I know we've gone over the time here. But yeah, can you share your links? And I'll share everything down below. But where can people find you, Dr. Mary? Yeah. So my website is coconutketones. com C O N U T K E T O N E S dot com. There's no Y in ketones. And I have diet guidelines. I have a page dedicated to Alzheimer's and dementia that talks about each of the different ketogenic strategies that people can do and diet guidelines for using coconut and MCT oil and articles about how, you know, all about ketone salts. What are some of the potential problems, you know, same thing for ketone ester. And how to get started with it. So there's a lot of free information people can get from my website. Awesome guys. Get on that. If you know anybody, I know Alzheimer's affects a lot of us and it's, it's a disease that's viewed as a slow progressive disease where not a lot of people really poorly understand it. And today, Dr. Mary, Dr. Mary's story here gives a lot of people hope and inspiration to. You know, keep looking for and keep being open minded with this sort of things, because this can, this may just save someone's life. Thank you so much, Dr. Mary Newport for coming on and sharing your story. Thank you, Lorenz. I really greatly appreciate the invitation to share this message with more people. Awesome. Awesome. Dr. Mary, thank you so much.