Let’s wrap up 2025

What stood out to me from the 30 posts I wrote this year were two hit-me-over-the-head topics.

These were also the ones you were most likely to have read (well, opened at least).

Those two big wake-up calls were (a) realising how deeply the Seventh Day Adventist church has influenced the way we think about food and nutrition today, and (b) grasping that for all the mystique around what causes dementia, it’s largely a metabolic disease.

Until I did the work to compile those posts, I wasn’t up to speed on either.

I knew the church owned Sanitarium, and that it championed ‘plant-based’ eating, but I didn’t appreciate how powerful it’s been, and still is, in shaping our dietary guidelines and the education of doctors, nurses and dietitians.

And this has been going on since the 1800s. The church created ‘health foods’, started the food industry, and now owns the Blue Zones company.

It helps explain why those dietary pyramids and plates have looked the way they have, but it’s also extraordinary (ridiculous, actually) that these ideas were handed down well over 100 years ago from a woman who received visions from God after a head injury.

As for dementia, it’s probably something we’re all keen to understand better. My 92-year-old mum lives in a nursing home with Alzheimer’s, and plenty of you know what it’s like to have a relative or friend in that situation.

So many times someone has said something to me like, “but who knows what we’ll be like by the time we’re that age?”.

Dementia, including Alzheimer’s, has that air about it. That we just never know; it could strike any of us if we live long enough.

Mostly we’ve been told that the major risk factors are age, being a woman, and genetics — all things we can do nothing about.

Even the Australian Bureau of Statistics announcement a few weeks ago identifying dementia as the country’s leading cause of death argued that we’re now more likely to live to an age where we have a higher risk of developing the disease, and that this is especially true for women given we have longer life expectancies.

Much as the ABS provides a great service, we ought to challenge statements like that. Living a long life is only an issue if we’re repeating certain behaviors over and over for a long time.

Dementia is not a part of normal ageing, it’s not something that happens to us because we’re women, and it’s not the result of unlucky genes. Even if we have the APOE-4 gene that would predispose us to the disease, diet — or more specifically, insulin resistance — trumps it.

It’s true that there are a range of possible risk factors for dementia, and we shouldn’t lose sight of the importance of staying socially connected, taking care of our hearing, and protecting our brain in every way we can. But when we consider that insulin resistance can account for 80%, that’s massive.

Which is why I loved psychiatrist Georgia Ede’s line (from a post last month) that we don’t have to be sitting ducks waiting to see if this will strike us.

There’s plenty we can do. And that’s good news, because if we manage what’s happening in our bodies insulin-wise, we head off a LOT of chronic disease, not just dementia.

Insulin resistance is a big factor in a range of other conditions, including non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, heart disease and stroke, gallbladder disease, and breast and colon cancer. Diabetes too, of course. It’s not the whole story in all of them, but it’s a decent chunk of the story.

At a conference I went to a couple of months ago a gastroenterologist noted that 90% of his patients have insulin resistance.

In April I wrote about the studies carried out in Wales and the US suggesting that getting vaccinated for shingles helps prevent dementia. In women (more than men) there’s an association between getting vaccinated and less prevalence of dementia in subsequent years.

Understandably, there’s speculation as to why this might be the case. Maybe because the vaccination boosts our immune system. Or because it reduces inflammation.

Or, once you realise that insulin resistance can be such a big factor, maybe the link is that health-conscious people (who are typically women) get vaccinated and their diligence extends to the way they eat, exercise, and so on.

Maybe healthier people get vaccinated, rather than the vaccination giving them some kind of brain protection. But no one wants shingles, so get the vaccination, even if it does nothing for your brain.

At the risk of banging on about this way too much, I’ll add a quick reminder of a post from August on the Swedish Longevity Study. The authors identified seven measures they believe are key to living a long life.

One of those was normal (not high) blood sugar, but at least four of the seven underlined the importance of limiting sugar, starch and alcohol. High cholesterol wasn’t a problem.

So if we want to blow out the candles on our 100^th birthday cake with a healthy brain, heart, and so forth, blood sugar (and insulin resistance) matters.

Anyway, moving on.

The post that made me smile all over again was one comprised of a few snippets from writer Anne Lamott’s columns about ageing in The Washington Post.

She notes that as we get older we get over the fear of missing out.

In its place, we have the fear of being pressured into gatherings we don’t want to go to. Luckily, at 65, along with your Social Security cheque, you earn the courage to beg off: “It sounds lovely, but I have other plans,” those plans being to stay in, eat popcorn and settle into the current TV binge. Saying no to things that deplete or bore us becomes an essential skill.

Those women in the photo? They just look like they’re having a good time, like they’ve said no to the boring, depleting stuff. Either that or they were shooting an ad for sunglasses.

Happy New Year!

Photo Source: Shutterstock