Diet and Oxidative Stress: A Novel Synthesis of Epidemiological Data on Alzheimer's Disease

In an innovative synthesis, William B. Grant links Alzheimer’s disease to diet by combining the prevalence of Alzheimer’s disease in several countries with a meta-analysis of communitybased studies of diet (3). A positive relationship between caloric, as well as fat, intake and the prevalence of Alzheimer’s disease is demonstrated. These findings link Alzheimer’s disease to diet in a more general sense than previous studies that focused instead on specific dietary components such as consumption of brain, raw meat, seafood, alcohol, coffee or vitamin supplements. These latter studies usually had the single goal of determining whether food-borne pathogens or toxins might be implicated, rather than focusing on foods as a source of nutrients. Numerous animal studies show prolonged maximum life span and health benefits with caloric restriction (reviewed in (2)), nonetheless, it is perhaps surprising that a multifactorial disease such as Alzheimer’s disease appears to be so responsive to total caloric or fat intake (r ~ 0.9). While it can be argued that the caloric content of food over many different ethnic groups