Pieter de Boer tragically lost his wife to Alzheimer’s disease way too soon. But during the illness he discovered the positive effects green tea had on the physical and mental state of his wife.
When my wife was 53 years old, the first signs of Alzheimer’s became apparent. Once, when the car engine shut off while driving, she couldn’t restart the car anymore. A few weeks later, she couldn’t find her way back to the bedroom after going to the toilet. Her orientation was gone.
Incontinent
Alzheimer’s disease affected her very quickly as she began to experience all the typical complaints. Aside from the deterioration of her orientation skills she became very restless and incontinent quite quickly. This was all the result of defective signals from the brain, of course.
Because she was relatively young, we were quickly referred to the VU hospital in Amsterdam, but the medication we received did not have the desired results. Conventional health care did not seem to help, and it was getting worse with my wife, so I was open to alternative medicine at this point.
Green tea
A friend gave me a note with the name of a great doctor in Germany, who himself had Alzheimer’s. This doctor was a big supporter of drinking green tea. The problem, however, was that this substance, EGCG, oxidized in the green tea that I made, which destroyed it’s beneficial effect.
Luckily, my work at Nestle finally came in handy here. I knew about experiments with lemon that caused the ph levels to drop below 4, preventing the tea from to discoloring, which is a sign of oxidation, and a beautiful bright green remained.
Lemon
When I gave my wife green tea with lemon juice, it was like a miracle. Her unrest disappeared, which also solved her incontinence problems. Those were the most important benefits. In the end, my wife lived for ten more years after the diagnosis, while the VU told her she only had 6 years left at most.
My wife drank one and a half liters of green tea with lemon juice a day and I’m convinced this improved her quality of life. Research has shown that the substance EGCG functions as an inhibitor of the growth of plaques within the brain, for which Alzheimer’s are known.
Radboud
Unfortunately, the scientific world does not want to this, and that irritates me a great deal. A doctor in Amsterdam had a commercial interest in one medicines that would be put on the market, which made him actively undermine research on the beneficial effects of green tea on Alzheimer’s.
Fortunately, Marcel Olde Rikkert of the Radboud in Nijmegen rose to the challenge. He and his team discovered from patients’ experiences that it is very effective. It is scientifically proven that EGCG inhibits Alzheimer’s.
