Lithium and Brain Health

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The health field has been buzzing about a study that was recently published related to Alzheimer’s disease markers and the mineral lithium, a soft, silvery-white alkali metal. Got lithium? You can use it in batteries, nuclear reactions, and many other industries; it’s also used in medications to stabilize mood.

Researchers decided to find out the relationship between markers for Alzheimer’s such as types of amyloid structures in the brain. There have been associations with reduced lithium intake and mild cognitive impairment in prior studies, so researchers decided to examine how mice on a reduced-lithium diet would respond. They measured several other minerals as well, but the only one associated with an increase in amyloid structures was lithium. It seems that when there’s not enough lithium in the diet, the brain cannot function as normal and sequesters the lithium in the amyloid bodies; brain function decreases further as lithium levels drop, including cognitive impairment.

The normal amount of lithium found in the diet suggests we get 0.6 to 3 mg per day, mostly from water and food. That amount is able to sustain the 7 mg typically found in an adult human. The next question would be how much it would take to reverse cognitive impairment. I’ll cover that on Saturday.

What are you prepared to do today?

        Dr. Chet

Reference: Nature. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09335-x

When It Comes to Carbs, Quality Matters

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You probably guessed right after reading Tuesday’s Memo that there are benefits from the quality of carbohydrates a person eats on a low-carb diet. In fact, one might say that because the carb intake is very low, every decision matters. Before getting into the results, let’s use the definition to identify the carbohydrate quality used in the study.

Good Carbs, Bad Carbs

High-quality carbohydrate diets are characterized by higher intakes of whole grains, non-starchy vegetables, whole fruits, nuts, and legumes, with correspondingly higher dietary fiber.

Lower quality carbohydrate diets are characterized by higher intakes of refined grains, sugar-sweetened beverages, baked desserts, and other sweet snacks.

The Results

While there were numerous statistical applications used, when comparing the lowest quintile of high-quality carbohydrates with the highest, as the percentage of high-quality carbohydrates increased, the markers of inflammation decreased.

When comparing the lowest quintile of low-quality carbohydrates with the highest quintile, the markers of inflammation increased as the percentage intake increased.

Understand that the high-quality carb eaters ate low-quality carbs as well, just not as much as the low-quality carb eaters. That means you don’t have to eat only one way. I’ve been developing a carb theory, one that goes along with the 80/20 rule: if you can eat well 80% of the time, you can loosen up 20% of the time, at least when it comes to carbohydrate quality.

The Bottom Line

This was not the be-all, end-all study; they used food frequency questionnaires, and I’ve talked ad nauseum about why I think they’re not much better than no info at all. But it was a practical approach to establishing that eating better most of the time can have benefits and may even reduce the risk of disease. We’ll see if there are future papers that track morbidity and mortality in the same group of subjects. Until then, eat less, eat better, and move more.

What are you prepared to do today?

        Dr. Chet

Reference: Current Developments in Nutrition. 2025. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cdnut.2025.107479

Lower Carb Diet: Does Quality Count?

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The Framingham Study began in 1948 and focused on monitoring nutrition and cardiovascular disease among other conditions. The purpose was to monitor the dietary and health habits as well as the health outcomes of a large group of people over time. Much of what we know about diet and cardiovascular disease comes from the longitudinal data collected; that study continues today with a focus on the children whose parents were part of the original study. Study participants have regularly scheduled physicals and blood work as well as dietary intake assessed by a food frequency questionnaire.

The researchers wanted to study the effect of high-quality carbohydrate intake versus low-quality carbohydrate intake on markers of inflammation in those people following a lower carbohydrate diet. These were not hard-core ketogenic diet followers; the average carbohydrate intake was about 41% instead of the typical 50% to 60%. Subjects had similar intakes of percentage of protein and fat intake. They were compared by the quality of the carbohydrates that they ate.

The subjects were followed for over six years to see if there were any changes in inflammatory markers, because inflammation is related to an increased risk of many diseases and conditions including cardiovascular disease. Was it beneficial to eat better carbs? I’ll let you know on Saturday along with comments about the significance of this study.

Tomorrow night is the Insiders conference call. If you want to participate and get your questions answered, become an Insider by 8 p.m. ET tomorrow night; I’ll include you in the call or you can listen to the replay.

What are you prepared to do today?

        Dr. Chet

Reference: Current Developments in Nutrition. 2025. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cdnut.2025.107479

Walking for Fitness

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The message from Tuesday’s Memo was that walking over 4,000 steps per day can bring health benefits from several diseases and conditions, and the benefits increase the more steps you take—up to about 12,000 steps, the highest that were recorded in the studies. What I didn’t say was that those were not all workout steps. Some people certainly included their exercise steps within those steps taken when they wore tracking devices, but most totals just reflected a person’s normal activity.

What if you could boost the benefits you get? We know that fitness levels decrease the risk of cardiovascular disease at every age. What if you turned up the intensity of the steps you already take? Research shows fitter people live longer in every age group—even those in their 80s and 90s—so it makes sense to challenge yourself and increase your fitness level.

Three Ways to Boost Fitness While Walking

1. Walk faster. You can be precise and count seconds or steps, or you can pick spots where you have the room and just walk faster. How fast? It depends on your fitness level and orthopedic issues, but a goal could be 5% of your steps in a day. If you averaged 4,000 steps per day, that would be 200 steps broken into 10 segments of 20 steps. You could increase that over time to 10% of your daily steps.

2. Walk up hills. Use the same idea as with walking faster. In my neighborhood, I’m usually going up a hill or down one. I do about 150 steps up a hill as fast as I can and then saunter back to the bottom of the hill. Again, use the same concept as you would with walking faster: time or percentage of total steps.

3. Use the stairs. Every step is a step, but a step bearing your weight is even better. Every floor will have between 10-15 steps between floors. You can even do this in your home. Same logic regarding time or percentage of total steps.

Should You Take a Companion?

Years ago, Paula’s cousin decided to improve his fitness, so he’d go out for a walk every evening. He’s not a scary guy but he lives in a nice neighborhood, and several times he was questioned by police patrolling the area. So he got a dog to take with him on his evening walks—and he was never questioned again.

The Bottom Line

Walking is a great form of exercise, and we’ve seen the benefits from the research on mortality and morbidity, but examining the walking speed in those studies shows that most steps taken by most people were between two and three mph. That’s pretty slow. We also know that being fitter increases benefits regardless of age. If you get your doctor’s permission to exercise more strenuously, adding some type of higher intensity challenges one or two times a week can increase your fitness level without spending any more time than you currently are.

What are you prepared to do today?

        Dr. Chet

References:
1. Lancet Public Health 2025; 10: e668–81
2. JAMA Intern Med. 2019. doi:10.1001/jamainternmed.2019.0899.
3. JACC. 2022. Fitness and Mortality. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jacc.2022.05.031

Research Update on Walking

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Questioning prevailing thought and dogma are always a good idea in my opinion. Last week’s look at eggs put the issue of dietary cholesterol and LDL-cholesterol in perspective.

This week we’re going to look at the concept of 10,000 steps per day as the number required to get health benefits. This first came up in 2019 when a research group looked for a relationship between walking and all-cause mortality in an elderly group of subjects. There was, and they found that about 7,500 steps per day were needed to see a benefit. (The 10,000 steps as initially promoted was actually a marketing ploy, as I wrote about back then.)

This time, researchers wanted to expand the examining all-cause mortality to include the following:

  • Cardiovascular disease incidence
  • Cardiovascular disease mortality
  • Cancer incidence
  • Cancer mortality
  • Type 2 diabetes symptoms
  • Dementia
  • Depressive symptoms
  • Falls

They used meta-analyses to combine the results from over 60 studies and presented the results in hazard ratios. Every cause of mortality and morbidity decreased once they reached 4,000 steps per day. The benefits continued with additional steps; they slowed down at over 7,000 steps per day but continued to improve.

There were interesting differences between morbidity and mortality. While walking lowered the hazard ratio of cardiovascular disease mortality by 47% or more, it only reduced the hazard ratio of getting cardiovascular disease by 25%. Taken to an extreme, you might still have a heart attack, but you won’t die from it. There were similar results for cancer; the incidence was reduced by only 5%, but mortality was reduced by 34%.

Even though they weren’t randomized controlled trials, I think that’s phenomenal. But could you juice the results even more? I’ll let you know on Saturday.

What are you prepared to do today?

        Dr. Chet

References:
1. Lancet Public Health 2025; 10: e668–81
2. JAMA Intern Med. 2019. doi:10.1001/jamainternmed.2019.0899.

Eggs: A Practical Solution

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Based on Tuesday’s Memo, do we have a “hard-boiled” answer to the question of whether the dietary cholesterol in egg yolks positively impacts LDL-cholesterol levels? Or total cholesterol levels? We can’t “eggsactly” get a complete answer from this study, and here’s why. (Okay, no more puns or “yolking” around.)

Study Issues

  • The LDL-cholesterol levels in the EGG phase (high cholesterol, low sat fat, two eggs per day) were 104 mg/dl. That was lower than the 108 mg/dl in the EGG-Free phase (low cholesterol, high sat fat, no eggs) and lower than the 109 mg/dl in the control group that ate the typical diet, but with only one egg per week. The standard deviation with the groups was over 20 mg/dl, which means that 66.7% of the subjects in any group could be 20 mg higher or 20 mg lower; that 104 result could actually be 84–124.
  • While an argument could be made that the standard deviations were similar, there’s also the potential measurement error. That is currently 12%, so as all measures were about 100 mg/dl, each individual measurement could be within a range of 88–112 mg/dl.

These two issues alone raise doubt whether the EGG diet clearly reduced LDL-cholesterol.

There are also a couple of dietary factors:

  • When placed on the reduced fat diet while eating two eggs per day, the fiber intake increased by eight grams per day, while the grams of protein decreased by 20–30 grams per day. Fiber can lower cholesterol.
  • Less protein would be available to be made into sugar and fat.

One comment pointed to the statement “funded by the Egg Council” to suggest that’s why the data skewed the way it did, but the last thing we want to do is discourage that kind of research. If private companies and associations do not fund research, it won’t get done; there’s no reason to believe that the NIH will fund basic science research going forward.

A Practical Approach

As I’ve maintained recently, whether talking about seed oils, maltodextrin, or eggs in this case, it’s all about the amount consumed. What the study did show is that excess saturated fat may be, and probably always has been, the cause of abnormal cholesterol levels in people without the genetic tendency toward high cholesterol. The lesson for us is to try to get saturated fat intake to less than 10% of your total caloric intake. One more thing—increase the intake of vegetables to decrease the percentage of saturated fat as well.

If you follow these two suggestions, there should be no problem with eating eggs every day if you want. Just be careful of fat bombs such as sausage and bacon that can add fat you don’t need.

What are you prepared to do today?

        Dr. Chet

Reference: AJCN. 2025. 122 :83–91. DOI: 10.1016/j.ajcnut.2025.05.001

To Egg or Not to Egg?

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That’s today’s question. This Memo was driven by another provocative headline from a university press release: “Groundbreaking study finds eggs don’t harm heart health” published in SciTech Daily. I think most informed healthcare professionals have known for a while that there’s little to no relationship between cardiovascular disease and dietary cholesterol from eggs and other animal sources—at least for most people.

Researchers in Australia decided to investigate how much dietary cholesterol from eggs, saturated fat, and a low-fat diet would impact a variety of blood lipid levels. While they measured at least 50 variables related to cardiovascular disease, they focused on LDL cholesterol. They recruited 61 healthy people, 48 of whom completed the 15-week study. In a random order, each subject spent five weeks on one of the following diets (note the amount of cholesterol and saturated fat in each diet):

  • The control diet had high cholesterol and high saturated fat; it mimicked the typical Australian diet, which is similar to the typical American diet. They were limited to one egg per week.
  • The EGG diet had high cholesterol but low saturated fat, plus two eggs per day.
  • The EGG-Free diet had low cholesterol and high saturated fat with no eggs.

What did they find when they compared how people did on each diet? Those on the EGG diet averaged 6 mg/dl lower LDL-cholesterol than either the EGG-free diet or the control diet. The EGG-free diet that was high in saturated fat resulted in the highest LDL cholesterol. Even with no additional eggs, the control diet still had higher LDL than the EGG diet. 

Does this give the egg a free pass when it comes to blood lipids? Can the lead author really state, “We’ve delivered hard-boiled evidence in defense of the humble egg”? I’ll let you know on Saturday.

What are you prepared to do today?

        Dr. Chet

Reference: AJCN. 2025. 122 :83–91. DOI: 10.1016/j.ajcnut.2025.05.001

Finding New Ways

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Thanks to everyone who wished me a happy birthday by replying to Paula’s Memo or on social media. I appreciate the sentiments and the kind words; it’s great to have you along for the ride as we all try to be healthier.

After a long, drawn-out process, my email has been whitelisted again by the powers that be in that arena. If you’ve missed some Memos in the past couple of months, check your spam folder. They may be there, or you can just visit the website and look through the Memos section.

New Ways

Whether you’re in your 20s, your 70s, or any place in-between, our bodies change over time. The things we used to do with ease, even something as simple as walking, can become challenging.

I heard a quote that went something like this: “I can’t do things the normal way. I have to do things a different way.”

We can relate that to anything we used to do with ease but may now limit us. I’ve noticed a subtle change in my balance—not one that has resulted in falling, but just enough that I notice it. I definitely have noticed a change in my strength. Those are physical attributes.

Our brains change as does just about every system in the body. There may be changes in the digestive system. If there is one thing I’ve learned over the years is that pretty much everyone dislikes any change in their bathroom habits. What was once your normal may not be normal more for you.

That realization is a critical junction. You can begin to limit what you do, or you find a different way to do it. It may require a change in the type of exercise or even beginning to exercise at all. Or maybe a more diverse diet, weight loss, or better dental care. And on and on.

As our bodies change, our normal way of doing things may change. You can decide to shrink your world, or you can decide to do things a different way. It all depends on what you want your world to be.

What are you prepared to do today?

        Dr. Chet

Happy Birthday, Dr. Chet!

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Hi, Gang—Paula here. Today is Chet’s birthday, and he’s letting me take over; that photo above is a few years old, but it’s one of my faves. I’ve done a lot of thinking about what to get him for his birthday, and I decided the best gift would be something you can help me give him: more readers.

In his mission to help people be healthier, it’s important to reach as many people as possible. Here’s the ask:

If you know people who are interested in improving their health, please invite them to subscribe to Dr. Chet’s Health Memo.

For example, you might choose whichever recent Memo has been your favorite and forward it to those people. Almost everyone knows people with lower back pain, so the July 12 Memo on “Walking and Lower Back Pain” might be a good candidate; so would last Saturday’s Memo on “Artificial Intelligence? Focus on Artificial” because we’re all being bombarded with competing (and sometimes ridiculous) health claims. Or you can just include this link to the Memo page and let your friends browse: https://www.drchet.com/memos/. His bio page has all the info on his background and qualifications if they’re curious. Every page has a subscribe button at the bottom to make it easy (and it’s equally easy to unsubscribe). Did you know new subscribers get a free MP3 of Dr. Chet’s Top Ten Tips—Small Changes for a Healthier Life, in English or Spanish?

Most of all, I want to say thank you for joining Chet and me as we make one more trip around the sun. You’re the reason for what we do, and we’re eternally grateful.

Dr. Chet Paula

Artificial Intelligence? Focus on Artificial

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Recently, I researched a topic on PubMed, the government database of published scientific research. There was a posting on the home page that the National Center for Biotechnological Information would be down for usual maintenance. That’s something we’ve come to expect from just about any database-based website.

But it made me pause for a few minutes. When I use AI to research a topic, I’m not really interested in what it says; I’m interested in the research the AI used to formulate its answer. For topics I search for, the research has to include scientific research from PubMed and other science databases. I ignore comments based on information from other websites that are based on interpretation of research rather than the research itself.

What occurred to me were these questions:

  • What if studies on some topics were intentionally left out of the database? That means that we would not be getting the full research on important health conditions and treatments.
  • What if some studies that were not peer-reviewed were added to the database? If that were to happen, a researcher with enough familiarity with prior research might be able to understand that something isn’t right, but people looking for answers for their own health and disease might accept what AI produced.

If you use AI to search for answers related to health and disease, check the references the AI provides. Here is my ranking of references you can use as a guideline by degrees of importance:

First degree
The actual research paper(s). You can read the abstract if nothing else.

Second degree
The press release hitting the highlights about the research, typically from the laboratory or agency that did the research.

Third degree
A credentialed health expert’s evaluation of the actual research, although this is subject to bias.

Fourth degree
A comment on the press release by just about anyone with a website or a podcast? Forget it. Use it to find clues to the original research, but don’t base any life changes on it.

As I said, I use the research papers only to verify that AI searched for and found papers related to the topic. Once past that level, there can always be some form of bias in the references.

I’ll leave you with two thoughts:

  • First, AI is only as good as the databases it’s allowed to search to find answers. By disallowing certain sources of research, it’s easy to influence the direction of the response.
  • Second, artificial means just that. AI can search, prioritize, and use algorithms to perform the search, and it will do it fast. But at the end of the day, it’s artificial—it’s a computer—with no ability to interpret what it’s sending you.

For more perspective, I’ll assign you a movie: watch Terminator again and think about Skynet.

What are you prepared to do today?

        Dr. Chet