The Daily Mail reports on how families use coconut oil to ease Alzheimer’s.
Professor Clarke, an expert on the way the body makes and uses energy, believes coconut oil and similar compounds might help by boosting the brain’s energy supply.
Most of the time our brains rely on glucose from carbohydrates, but if that isn’t available — because we haven’t eaten anything for a while or because we’re eating almost no carbohydrates — then our brain cells can switch to using the energy from our fat stores.
This energy comes in the form of small molecules called ketones.
As Professor Clarke explains: ‘Coconut oil contains a lot of a particular sort of fat that our bodies can use to make more of the ketone “brain food”.
‘It’s known as MCT (medium chain triglycerides) and it’s not found in the fats most of us eat.’
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