Does Coconut Oil heal Alzheimer’s?

Simplistically, the answer may well be "yes"!

Many of us from Choiseul were raised on the gospel that the coconut has numerous medical and therapeutic benefits. Traditionally, there have been claims that the dry coconut was an excellent antioxidant, laxative and that it could also help with prostate cancer. However, because those claims were based on purely anecdotal data over time; and they were therefore rendered “unscientifically untenable”.

The coconut came into the international spotlight a few years ago with the claim that its oil was a health risk largely because of its allegedly high cholesterol content; that claim may have led to a precipitous decline in its popularity as our national oil.

There was the claim that drug companies were worried about coconut supplements eating into their “monopoly profits” and may have maliciously invented the propaganda.

Well, a few years later, a powerful counter-story has emerged.   Dr Mary Newport - a medical director of the neonatal intensive care unit at Spring Hill Regional Hospital in Florida - discovered that Coconut Oil can cure Alzheimer’s.

Her husband, in his early 50s, started showing signs of “progressive dementia” which later became Alzheimer’s disease.  "He couldn’t even find a spoon or remember how to get water out of the refrigerator", the wife said.

Dr Mary Newport said, “We tried the Alzheimer’s drugs but they did not work”.

However, intent on finding a way out for her husband, Dr. Newport started researching the mechanism behind Alzheimer’s. She discovered that with Alzheimer’s disease, certain brain cells might have difficulty utilizing simple sugar, which is the brain’s principal source of energy. Without that energy, these precious neurons may begin to die.

That’s where, Dr Newport alleged, the coconut oil came in as “the miracle cure”. She claimed that she started administering the coconut oil to her husband twice a day.

"At that point, he could barely remember how to draw a clock”, she said.

Two weeks after adding coconut oil to his diet, his drawing improved. Dr. Newport saw incredible changes in him.

 “Every morning, he was alert and happy, talkative, making jokes. His gait was still a little weird, but his tremor was no longer very noticeable. He was able to concentrate on things that he wanted to do around the house and in the yard and stay on task, whereas before coconut oil he was easily distractible and rarely accomplished anything unless he was directly supervised,” she said.

“Over the next year, the dementia continued to reverse itself: he is able to run again, his reading comprehension has improved dramatically, and his short-term memory is improving—he often brings up events that happened days to weeks earlier and relays telephone conversations with accurate detail.”

The results of Dr Newport’s research may not be scientifically conclusive! Testability, among other things, still remains an issue and it may be over-simplistic to suggest that coconut oil is a universal cure for Alzheimer's and dementia - as perhaps, there might have been other factors which might have played a part in Dr Newport's husband recovery!

However, there is “nothing” preventing us from trying it out. If Dr Newport’s claims are true, then we may well have miracle cure for Alzheimer’s/Dementia right within our hands and that we don’t even know about it.