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E-news ExclusiveStudy Suggests Role of Dietary Advanced Glycation End Products in Risk of Alzheimer’s Disease
AGEs are a group of compounds that are combinations of sugars and proteins and other large molecules. They can be formed in the body, and there is a large body of literature on AGEs and Alzheimer's disease. However, AGEs are also formed when food is cooked at high temperatures or aged for a long period, such as in hard cheese. AGEs increase the risk of various chronic diseases through several mechanisms including increased inflammation and oxidative stress. They can also bind to the receptor for AGEs (RAGE). RAGE transports beta-amyloid proteins across the blood-brain barrier and contributes to the development of Alzheimer’s disease. The newly published paper is the first that estimated the AGE content of diets from observational studies in various countries, which estimated the link between dietary factors and the risk of Alzheimer’s disease. For this purpose, the values for AGE for many types of food were taken from a study by researchers at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York. They cooked 549 foods by different methods and measured the AGE content of the cooked food. They found that the higher the cooking temperature, the higher the AGE content. For example, 100 g of raw beef had 707 kU of AGEs, but 100 g of roast beef had 6,071 kU. To use those findings in the new study, researchers obtained information from observational studies in which diet was assessed using food frequency questionnaires or from national dietary supply values from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. They then used either a range of cooking temperatures or methods for the observational studies or an estimate of average cooking methods and temperatures for the national dietary supply data. In typical national diets, researchers found that meat accounted for the highest contribution of AGEs, followed by vegetable oils, cheese, and fish. Foods such as cereals/grains, eggs, fruit, legumes, milk, nuts, starchy roots, and vegetables generally make low contributions to the total amount of AGEs in a diet, either because they are generally prepared at low temperatures or because they compose smaller portions of diets. According to Jaime Uribarri, MD, and Weijing Cai, MD, of The Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, “This epidemiological study supports our previous findings in animals and humans of an important role for dietary AGEs in Alzheimer’s disease. We found that mice kept on a diet high in AGEs, similar to Western diet, had high levels of AGEs in their brains together with deposits of amyloid-β, a component of the plaques characteristic of Alzheimer’s disease, while at the same time developed declines in cognitive and motor abilities. The mice fed a low-AGE diet remained free of these conditions. In addition, clinical studies have shown that subjects with higher blood AGE levels, in turn resulting from high AGE diets, are more likely to develop cognitive decline on follow up. The findings point to an easily achievable goal that could reduce the risk of dementia through the consumption of non-AGE-rich foods, for example, foods that are cooked or processed under lower heat levels and in the presence of more water, raising the importance of not just what we eat, but also how we prepare what we eat.” — Source: IOS Press BV |
