Ketones, omega-3 fatty acids and the Yin-Yang balance in the brain: insights from infant development and Alzheimer’s disease, and implications for human brain evolution
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Optimal brain performance is intimately linked to the brain’s Yin and the Yang − the balance between its structure and its energy metabolism. This relationship is clearly exemplified in infant brain development and in Alzheimer’s disease, and probably also applies to human brain evolution. In these examples,redundant pathwayshelp achieve this important balance. For instance, the key structural lipid for the brain, docosahexaenoic acid (DHA), is supplied to the infant brain from at last three overlapping sources: (i) milk; (ii) infant’s own fat stores and (iii) by some endogenous synthesis from α-linolenic acid (ALA) or eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA). On the energy side, glucose is normally the brain’s main fuel but under conditions of prolonged starvation, it can be almost totally replaced by the ketone bodies, acetoacetate and β-hydroxybutyrate. When ketones are present in the blood they spare glucose uptake by the brain because they are actually the brain’s preferred fuel and are essential for normal infant brain development. The redundant sources of ketones are long chain fatty acids (including the relatively ketogenic ALA) in infant stores, and medium chain triglycerides (MCT) in milk. Besides infancy, nowhere is the strain on the brain’s balance between yin and yang more apparent than in Alzheimer’s disease (AD). One of the reasons why attempts to treat AD have largely failed could well be because chronically inadequate glucose supply to some areas of the brain on the order of 10% is present in people at risk of AD long before cognitive decline begins. However, brain ketone uptake is still normal even in moderately advanced AD. Hence, treatments that ignore the brain energy (glucose) deficit in AD would be predicted to fail, but treatments that attempt to rescue brain fuel availabilityviaketones would be predicted to have a better chance of succeeding. By analogy to ketones sparing glucose for brain energy metabolism, perhaps ALA or EPA entering the brain can help spare (conserve) DHA for its structural role. If so, it would not necessarily be futile to transport ALA and EPA into the brain just to β-oxidize the majority afterwards; DHA sparing as well as ketone production could be important beneficiaries.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".