“Four tablespoons of this ‘brain food’ may prevent Alzheimer’s.”
That’s what Internet osteopath Joseph Mercola claims about the coconut oil he sells on his website. However, no good studies have shown that coconut oil can prevent or treat Alzheimer’s or other dementias.
Still, research into the components of this oil could lead to new treatments.
how it started
The belief that coconut oil can treat dementia got its big push in 2008 when Florida pediatrician Mary Newport was desperately trying to enroll her husband, Steve, in a clinical trial of a promising new Alzheimer’s drug. But he couldn’t score high enough on a mental screening test to qualify.
Then she remembered reading on the Internet that a company claimed promising results from giving special fats extracted from coconut oil to Alzheimer’s patients. Thinking they had nothing to lose, Newport bought a jar of coconut oil from a health food store and put several tablespoons in her husband’s oatmeal the next morning, hours before another test.
That afternoon she was astonished to learn that Steve had passed and was accepted into a study of an experimental drug. He could remember things like the day of the week, the month, the season, and what city he was in, all of which he had trouble doing the day before.
“He said he felt as if a light had switched on,” she recalled.
Mary Newport spreads the news
So began the Newports’ journey. Steve ate coconut oil every day, sometimes mixed with extra amounts of the special fats, which are called medium chain triglycerides (MCT). And Mary spread the word about coconut oil’s potential as an Alzheimer’s cure by writing a blog, lobbying scientists and politicians, and writing a book called Alzheimer’s Disease: What If There Was a Cure? The Story of Ketones (Basic Health Publications, 2011).
In 2015, Mary reported on how her husband Steve has been doing. “He improved very significantly and steadily the first year and remained stable for 2 more years,” she wrote on the website coconutketones.com. Then he fell, started having seizures, and never fully recovered. “He remains in our home with the help of our wonderful caregivers and has had minimal further worsening over the past two years,” she says. Although Steve will not likely recover, “there is now at least Hope for others,” Mary writes.
Unfortunately, the evidence for coconut oil doesn’t match the level of Newport’s enthusiasm.
our brains are capable of using ketones
“Our brains normally use only glucose for energy,” explains National Institutes of Health researcher Richard Veech, who has worked with the Newports.
“But during fasting or starvation, when we draw on our fat stores for energy, our brains can switch to using products of fat metabolism called ketones as a replacement for glucose, provided the ketone levels get high enough in the brain.”
Early on in diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, the brain starts to lose its ability to use glucose, which leads to a kind of starvation of the brain. But the brain can still use ketones.
the catch is getting enough
“If we could get the level of ketones in the brain up high enough in Alzheimer’s patients, the hope is that they can use this for energy in place of glucose and we may be able to restore some of the brain’s mental functions,” says Veech.
But don’t expect that to happen from consuming coconut oil or MCTs, Veech cautions. While cells produce ketones when they metabolize the medium-chain triglycerides in coconut oil, “that doesn’t lead to levels anywhere near high enough in the brain to do much good,” he notes.
an inconclusive trial
Several years ago, a Colorado company tested a powder consisting of 100 percent MCTs extracted from coconut oil and palm kernel oil on 140 patients with mild to moderate Alzheimer’s disease. According to the company, Accera Inc, the MCT takers scored better than the placebo takers on a test of cognitive impairment given after 45 days (though the study found no difference after 90 days).
However, the company study was riddled with irregularities. Veech wasn’t impressed with the results. Nor evidently was the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Accera gave up trying to get FDA to approve its MCT powder as a drug and now sells it under the name Axona as a prescription “medical food” for the “clinical dietary management of mild-to-moderate Alzheimer’s disease.” (A medical food needs far less evidence than a drug does to be approved for sale by the FDA.)
Meanwhile, “We’re trying to interest food companies in producing ketones directly, bypassing the MCT stage,” Veech says.
And a new trial of coconut oil for Alzheimer’s disease is underway at the University of South Florida. Patients with mild to moderate Alzheimer’s disease are being given a commercial coconut oil beverage for three months and a placebo for three months, in random order, to see if the coconut oil has any more of an effect on cognitive function than the placebo. Mary Newport serves on the scientific advisory board of the company that manufactures the beverage. Results are expected in 2017.
Sources:
the Accera study: Nutr. Metab. 6: 31, 2009.
details about the University of South Florida study: clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT01883648
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