Is China’s Alzheimer’s Nightmare Becoming Our Reality?
Is China’s Alzheimer’s Nightmare Becoming Our Reality?
Patrick Holford examines how China is advancing Alzheimer’s prevention through nutrition, lifestyle and digital health initiatives, while questioning the pace of policy action in the UK.
The Race to Prevent Alzheimer’s in China
If there is one country that has to move fast to prevent Alzheimer’s, it is China. And it is.
With almost a quarter of its population over 60, some 320 million people, and an estimated 20 million expected to have Alzheimer’s by 2030, costing close to a trillion dollars a year, government health officials are taking prevention very seriously indeed.
Those over 60 are not called old, elderly, or senior, but “silver-haired“, a growing community that is at the heart of China’s health prevention strategies.
The doctor in charge of the Silver-Haired Healthy Lifestyle campaign is Dr Zhang Lei. He is a famous TV doctor and former surgeon.
I asked him if he believed there would ever be a cure for Alzheimer’s.
“Prevention is the cure,” he said. “And I want to make a special announcement. Next year, when your excellent book Alzheimer’s: Prevention is the Cure is published in Chinese, we will use this book as the cornerstone of our national prevention campaign. We already have direct access to 20 million people through our networks, but our ambition is to reach as many as 100 million. We will encourage everyone to take the online Cognitive Function Test from Food for the Brain. This book and this tool together will be our roadmap for a prevention revolution in China.”
Prevention-First Approach
I attended and spoke at the 2nd Silver-Haired Healthy Lifestyle Conference, where I met hundreds of silver-haired people like myself. The event was attended by 2,500 people and broadcast to 10 million people across twenty TV channels.
Other speakers included leading professors of public health, nutrition, gerontology and geriatrics, all delivering positive and progressive messages about prevention, including eating more seafood and vegetables, stopping smoking, cutting right back on sugar, sleeping better and taking 10,000 steps a day.
I spoke about the essential need for, and codependence of, omega-3, phospholipids and B vitamins. If omega-3 were the man and phospholipids, rich in eggs and seafood, were the woman, then B vitamins are the priest, I said. When they are married in your brain, magic happens. Together, they are the three building blocks of every brain cell.
You could have heard a pin drop. Everyone was listening and, in China, action is taken quickly.
The former Health Minister said that “diet, supplements and lifestyle” are the cornerstones of prevention. “We need education, not medication.“
No one was talking about anti-amyloid treatments.
Prevent Alzheimer’s at Scale
Next year, when the 3rd Healthy Lifestyle Conference coincides with the Chinese publication of my book Alzheimer’s: Prevention is the Cure, I have been invited to speak at universities and health departments across China.
Many silver-haired people in China do not have computers, but they all have smartphones. There are virtually no physical wallets. Communication and payment are conducted through the WeChat app.
The professors and public health officials were therefore very excited about our online digital test. They want to get everyone using Food for the Brain’s Cognitive Function Test. The COGNITION questionnaire then helps people understand which specific prevention steps are most relevant to them.
The experts, health authorities and policymakers understand that changing behaviour is the hardest part, and that this kind of personalised digital technology is key to motivating individuals and measuring change to find out what really works. It is big-data science helping to sharpen prevention strategies.
Why China Is Embracing Nutrition Over Medication for Brain Health
Traditionally, Chinese culture sees food as medicine, which may be one reason people are more open to optimum nutrition. There is also a long tradition of using natural compounds to support health, so supplements are a natural extension of this way of thinking.
Not one person repeated the old myth that “you can get all the nutrients you need from a well-balanced diet“.
The stark ignoring of established scientific facts about, for example, B vitamins and omega-3, which have outperformed anti-amyloid treatments, by our politicians and health ministers is verging on outrageous when the lives and brains of so many are at stake.
China’s High-Speed Lesson for Alzheimer’s Prevention
As I sat on a high-speed train travelling 1,200 kilometres from Shanghai to Beijing in just 3.5 hours, faster than taking a plane, and capable of speeds of 650 kilometres an hour, I found myself contemplating how the UK has yet to deliver the promised high-speed rail line from London to Birmingham, a little over 100 miles, despite more than a decade of work, a projected cost of over £100 billion, and a journey time saving of less than half an hour.
If this same failure to translate prevention science into policy continues, as it has over the past two decades, offering platitudes about the importance of prevention but little action, while continuing to avoid the scientific evidence of what actually works, then China’s nightmare of a large proportion of its silver-haired population slipping into dementia will become our reality.
Alzheimer’s is preventable. That is a fact, not a belief.
Those who say it cannot be done should not stand in the way of those who are doing it.
Founder of the Food for the Brain Foundation and the Institute for Optimum Nutrition, Chair of the Scientific Advisory Board
Food for the Brain is a not for profit educational and research charity that offers a free Cognitive Function Test and assesses your Dementia Risk Index. This allows them to advise you on how to dementia proof your diet and lifestyle.
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