Bengaluru: Coastal Karnataka as well as Kerala are known for producing best coconut oil in India. The oil is usually used here as hair oil as well as for cooking, soap making, and even for massaging. Do you know the same coconut oil could be used as a remedy for Alzheimer’s disease?

According to Professor Kieran Clarke, an expert from the University of Oxford on the way the body makes and uses energy, coconut oil and similar compounds might help by boosting the brain’s energy supply.

“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,” Daily Mail reported quoting Professor Clarke. Dr Mary Newport, a paediatrician in Florida, who began using coconut oil to treat her husband, Harry, has seen remarkable progress in her husband.

Harry had been suffering from early onset Alzheimer’s for eight years. Dr Mary claims the results after he started taking the oil were remarkable.

“He began to get his short-term memory back. His depression lifted, he became more like his old self. The problem he’d had with walking improved. An MRI scan showed his brain had stopped shrinking,” she said.

Professor Rudy Tanzi, director of the Genetics and Ageing Research Unit at Massachusetts General Hospital and professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School, believes that virgin coconut oil contains the fats that can be converted into ketone bodies, which can serve as an alternate energy source for the brain.

“The ketone bodies could potentially provide energy to the glucose-deprived brains of Alzheimer’s patients,” he said in an article for the Cure Alzheimer’s Fund.

Coconut oil is known as heart-healthy oil that is free of cholesterol and trans-fats. Now many researchers suggest that it also improves brain health.

SOURCE : http://www.bfirst.in/health/can-coconut-oil-cure-alzheimers-499123