Treating Parkinson's disease with velvet beans.

I have several videos on foods that may trigger Parkinson's disease,

but how can diet be used in treatment?

This video in the next look at beans for treating this disease. Two centuries have passed since James Parkinson's essay on the shaking palsy,

described a disease characterized by tremor and problems with movement.

Today, treatment options include surgically implanting electrodes into the

brain. There has to be a better way.

We've known since the 1950s that Parkinson's disease is manifested by a dopamine deficiency

in the brain. Well, then, why not eat a dopamine diet? A variety of fruits and vegetables contain the same dopamine made by our brain.

Unfortunately, dopamine can't cross the blood-brain barrier and hence is ineffective as therapy.

However, the dopamine precursor, known as L-dopa or L-dopa,

can get from the blood up into the brain, where it can then be converted

to dopamine within the brain by an enzyme called decarboxylase.

We don't want the Leverdopa to be converted to dopamine outside the brain, because then it can't

get in, so we give people a decarboxylase inhibitor, which itself can't get into the brain, so that keeps

levodopa from prematurely turning into dopamine before it gets into the brain where we need it.

So eating dopamine-rich foods doesn't help, but what if we ate Leva-Dopa-rich foods?

More than 1,500 years before Dr. Parkinson came on the scene, an Indian physician seemed to have

nailed it and even suggested a treatment.

Velvet beans, the plant with the highest amount of al-Dopa.

Huh.

So might there be a way to forestall the epidemic of Parkinson's disease through plant-based remedies, after all?

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