#78 Amy Berger – Alzheimer’s Antidote

Meet Amy Berger

Amy Berger, MS, CNS, is a U.S. Air Force veteran and Certified Nutrition Specialist who specializes in using low-carbohydrate and ketogenic nutrition to help people reclaim their vitality through eating delicious foods, and showing them that getting and staying well doesn’t require starvation, deprivation, or living at the gym. Her motto is, “Real people need real food!” She blogs at www.tuitnutrition.com, where she writes about a wide range of health and nutrition-related topics, such as insulin, metabolism, weight loss, thyroid function, and more. She is the author of The Alzheimer’s Antidote: Using a Low-Carb, High-Fat Diet to Fight Alzheimer’s Disease, Memory Loss, and Cognitive Decline.   

Show Notes:

ABOUT AMY

• My book was published in March of 2017, but I had released an eBook version of it, a very preliminary early version, about a year or 2 before that
• I am a low-carb and Ketogenic oriented nutritionist, although I help people with all kinds of diets too
• I think I am primarily known as a writer though
• I have a blog on my website which is tuitnutrion.com
• I got into low-carb eating the way a lot of people do
• I wasn’t always a nutritionist
• I used to be heavier, and I was heavier despite exercising, around this time I found out about low-carb
• As a kid I was a couch potato but as I got older, I began exercising more, I ran marathons, and I was in the air force, so I am not afraid of a hard workout
• I was eating what I thought was a healthy diet, which consisted of lots of whole grain bread with margarine, pretzels and granola bars
• And no matter what I did, I could not lose weight
• I just felt like a failure for so many years because I could never get the weight off
• In 2003, I found the Atkins book, the 1992 version of “Dr. Atkins’ new diet revolution” and it just made sense
• It made sense to me why I could not lose weight while I was eating a high carb diet
• After having success with that, I realized that I could also help other people learn about this way of eating
• So, I went to graduate school to get my masters in nutrition 
• I personally came into this way of eating from strictly a weight loss goal, but after studying it for many years now, I actually have come to believe that weight loss is the least impressive thing that this diet is capable of doing
• When you look at what it can do for people with high blood sugar and type 2 diabetes, joint pain, PCOS and so many other health problems, losing a few extra pounds is just a bonus.
• Now it has been 15 years that I have been eating this way
• But, I will say that I am not always strictly Ketogenic. I am always eating a low-carb diet, and sometimes I eat more Keto and sometimes I don’t 
• It really just depends on what’s going on in my life or where I am at
• As much as I love the Keto world, sometimes we do go a little too far
• Some people do really need to be in strict ketosis for medical therapy. And some do just fine on a paleo diet which is not even low-carb by definition because you are not eating refined sugar or grains
• Most of my clients don’t really measure so, I can’t really say if they are in ketosis or not. They’re probably not, but that’s fine
• Not everybody needs to be in ketosis, not everybody needs that specific state of ketosis to have sharp thinking or to have physical energy
• Most of the people I work with do more of a paleo diet because I actually encourage them to increase their carbs
• I eat more low-carb myself, but I have clients who just don’t feel their best eating that way, usually it tends to be women who exercise a lot
• Some people can do that on a Ketogenic diet just fine, but a lot of people can’t
• I am not talking 300 grams of carbs a day, I am talking about to 50 to a 100
• Some people have to be under 20 or 30 grams of carbs a day to reach ketosis, and some can have 50-60 grams a day and still be in ketosis, it’s all very individual 
• I do have a family history with type 2 diabetes, obesity, strokes and also cancer, but not with type 3 diabetes which they regularly now refer to all Alzheimer’s diseases as
• The first place that I ever came across a possible connection between glucose and insulin in the brain and Alzheimer’s was in Gary Taubes book, Good Calories, Bad Calories
• Because I did not have a family history of it, it was interesting to me but it did not really captivate me
• It wasn’t until a couple of years later that I was in graduate school for nutrition and I had to pick my thesis topic and I was quite literally stunned by what I found, even just in my preliminary search
• You can’t look at research on Alzheimer’s and not realize that this is a metabolic problem in the brain
• The major fundamental problem in the brain of somebody with this disease is that, neurons in affected regions have lost the ability to get energy from glucose
• So, these cells basically starve and shrink because they can’t metabolize glucose properly
• We don’t know why is that happening, but we do know that, that is the problem
• More and more researchers have become aware that there a connection between metabolic syndrome and Alzheimer’s 
• Meaning, chronically high insulin and cognitive decline
• I think if people understood the metabolic and sort of biochemical underpinnings of this disease more, if they understood that this is a real thing, it might get easier for them to make that dietary change
• It has to be really hard to even entertain the possibility that this could be a diet and life style disease
• Because for so long we have been led to believe that it is complicated and mysterious, that there is so much we do not know, and that is true
• But, just because we don’t have all the answers doesn’t mean we don’t have any answers
• My book is called, The Alzheimer’s Antidote and you can find that on Amazon and there is a Kindle version that you can also find on Amazon
• My book does the best job of explaining the science in plain English, and showing people how simple and uncomplicated it can be to implement a low-carb diet
• My website is tuitnutrition.com
• When I was a kid, my mother had a little wooden coin that she kept in her purse and on one side of the coin it had a one block letters – tuit
• And in the back of it, there is a little explanation that is saying about, you are always putting things off until you get around “to it”
• So, this little round wooden coin was the round tuit
• When I was 18, I was at my heaviest but I have never been obese and so, I never claim that I understand what it’s like to not fit into a booth at a restaurant
• There is so much shame and stigma around body size in our society that it would be insulting to those people for me to claim that I know what it is like to be that size when I don’t
• I am 5’2 and the heaviest that I can remember, was 158 lbs.
• Unfortunately, there is no photographic evidence of me at my heaviest because I did not want my picture taken
• I was kind of a cardio queen and I did a lot of lifting too
• I have completed 2 marathons. I have endurance, but I do not have speed
• I had an extremely low-fat diet, but there was one period of time when I was unemployed, I lived with my parents and I had nothing better to do than workout
• I would go to the gym 2 hours in morning and 2 hours in the evening and I still did not lose weight, but gained a little bit of body fat
• My body was protecting me by holding onto all that fat because I was putting my body under so much stress

WISDOM YOU HAVE LEARNED ALONG THE WAY

• When I was new to low-carb there were only a few books and I was so much better off
• Because there was so much less information available than there is now
• But, because there was less information, there was less misinformation
• It is so wonderful that this way of eating has become so popular, but because it is so popular there is these new people coming into it who are spreading all kinds of wacky stuff that is totally unscientific
• You can be successful with the reduced carb diet or ketogenic diet without making yourself crazy over all the data
• 85% of what I do with my nutrition clients is debunk all these myths and sort the record straight and help them understand that this is so much simpler and straighter forward
• We all need to find people that we can relate to
• Everything works for somebody, but that doesn’t mean that everything works for everybody
• Using Ketogenic diet as a medical therapy for certain conditions requires a sort of different approach
• The type of ketone molecules that are registered in the blood, breath or urine are 3 different molecules
• People can choose to measure any which way they want
• You don’t have to measure at all, but you can if you want to
• It is not really necessary to measure long term
• What matters is whether you are getting the results you want
• The measuring can be helpful, but it is not essential
• I have a blogpost about measuring ketones
• We have become so far removed from listening to our own bodies

FAVORITE MEAL

• I am too much of a foodie to have a single favorite meal
• I love ribs when they are meaty
• I often cook a bunless burger with bacon or egg
• I am super simple

WHAT’S NEXT FOR YOU

• I will be speaking at an event in the very end of April at Salt Lake City
• I’ll be in Sweden for a big diabetes event in June
• I started a YouTube channel
• I will maybe create some small eBooks in the future

HOW CAN PEOPLE FIND YOU

• Website: tuitnutrition.com
• Twitter: tuitnutrition
• YouTube: Tuit Nutrition
• Amy’s Book: The Alzheimer’s Antidote: Using a Low-Carb, High-Fat Diet to Fight Alzheimer’s Disease, Memory Loss, and Cognitive Decline.

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