Click Play to begin – A follow-up video by Dr. John Lewis (TED Talk) is at the bottom of his page
We’re diving into a fascinating scientific study, actually a series of studies, connected to Alzheimer’s disease, a condition that affects memory and thinking. Alzheimer’s is a leading killer of Americans, imparts a significant toll on the quality of life of the patient and primary caregiver, and results in inordinate costs in an already overburdened medical system.
More specifically, we’ll look at how a special supplement — made mostly from Acemmannan, the active ingredient of the aloe vera plant — might help improve brain function and support the immune system. This first exposure in a series will be a focus on a 2013 study. This is another diligent effort to dig deeper and reach wider.
Understanding Alzheimer’s Disease
Alzheimer’s is a progressive brain disorder. That means it gets worse over time. It slowly destroys memory, thinking skills, and the ability to perform simple daily tasks. It primarily affects older adults and is currently the 6th leading cause of death in the United States.
One of the biggest challenges with Alzheimer’s is that there’s no cure, and most treatments available do little to stop or reverse the disease. That’s why researchers are actively exploring new options—including those outside traditional pharmaceuticals.
The study is titled: The Effect of an Aloe Polymannose Multinutrient Complex on Cognitive and Immune Functioning in Alzheimer’s Disease.
Standard drugs have shown little to moderate benefit. Many natural treatments have been studied too, including:
- Vitamin E: One study showed it could delay progression in moderate AD, but high doses (>400 IU) are linked to increased risk of death.
- Omega-3 fatty acids: Helped people with mild memory problems, but not Alzheimer’s.
- Ginkgo biloba: A review showed a small but real improvement in memory with short-term use.
Aloe Polymannose, referenced in the title of the study is Acemannan and the complex nutraceutical used in this study, that Acemannan was the main ingredient of, they named APMC or Aloe Polymannose Multinutrient Complex. It also contained Rice bran, yam powder, cherry tart, and omega-3s; and various other natural compounds that support the immune system.
Participants mixed 4 teaspoons of this powder into liquids daily for a full year. This was a near equivalent of 10 grams of APMC powder daily. Doctors checked their memory, thinking skills, and daily abilities at the start, and again after 3, 6, 9, and 12 months. They also looked at parts of the immune system in the blood at the start and at the end.
Who Participated?
The study involved 34 older adults with moderate to severe Alzheimer’s disease. The average age was around 80 years old. Many of them were already on Alzheimer’s medications and didn’t qualify for other typical clinical trials due to the severity of their condition.
That’s what makes this study unique — it focused on real people with real challenges, not just ideal test cases.
And before we move on to the study at hand, one author of this study (H. Reginald McDaniel) had already shown strong interest in this subject and had initiated a pilot study as early as 2006 called “A Multi-Site Pilot Survey of Micronutrients in Alzheimer’s Patients”. Presented at: The 2nd Annual Glycomics MedicalConference: Science of Glycobiology. Houston, TX.
The study is not available online but it has been cited here and in another study on the subject. It reported that after the use of an Acemannan-based multinutrient on 48 Alzheimer’s patients that after 6 months, 52% improved their Alzheimers’s severity scores by an average of 28.9%. The others declined by 34%. No serious side effects were reported.
Now back to our featured 2013 study
What Did the Study Measure?
Researchers tracked progress over 12 months, measuring:
- Cognitive function – how well people could think, remember, and focus
- Daily living skills – like eating, bathing, and dressing
- Immune health – using blood tests to track changes in inflammation and immune cell behavior
They used tools like the ADAS-Cog (a memory and thinking test) and the MMSE (Mini-Mental State Exam) to assess cognitive changes.
What Happened to Brain Function?
The results were promising.
- Nearly half the participants (46%) saw improvements in their ADAS-Cog scores (a primary tool for dementia assessment), especially after 9 and 12 months.
- That’s significant, because in Alzheimer’s, most patients gradually decline over time.
Other tests, like the MMSE and ADCS-ADL (which measures everyday function), didn’t show strong improvement. In fact, some showed a decline. But the main cognitive test improved — a strong signal that the supplement may be supporting brain health. This figure is from the study and I have highlighted the cognitive improvements in yellow. Take note that with this cognitive test a lower score is better, indicating improved thinking and memory.
It is important to note that this study contributes novel data (something not seen or studied before) by combining cognitive assessments with detailed immunological profiling over time in Alzheimer’s patients. So they evaluated both cognition and biochemical. Speaking of biochemical; the next question needing answers is What Happened to the Immune System?
What Happened to the Immune System?
And since this novel data included the folding in of measurements of the immune system blood samples were taken. These Blood samples showed reduced inflammation. This is significant. Scientists found lower levels of cytokines like IL-2, IL-4, TNF-alpha, and VEGF — which are proteins that signal the immune system and are involved in both pro-inflammation and anti-inflammation, as well as immune activation. The yellow highlight points to those measurements researchers classified as statistically significant; statistics that represent a decrease in inflammation
VEGF (Vascular Endothelial Growth Factor) promotes blood vessel growth and is linked to brain health. When these cytokine measurements are too high, it can lead to chronic inflammation, which is bad for the brain. Of the seven cytokines that are inclined toward pro-inflammation only two indicated a higher rating after 12 months. The other five, though not classified as statistically significant leaned downward.
These changes suggest that the Acemannan-based supplement modulated the immune system — helping it calm down where needed and function more effectively overall. This last statement is one that is confirmed by other studies already published at this site that can be found at these links:
These links can be accessed in the transcription below.
Was the Acemannan Supplement Safe?
Yes —it was reported as generally safe and well-tolerated. A few had mild effects, like loose stools and increased blood pressure, but those were managed by adjusting the dosage. Three participants passed away during the study, due to unrelated conditions like stroke or heart disease.
What’s the Connection Between Brain and Immune Changes?
Here’s where it gets really interesting: The novel data was helping us think more deeply.
- People who had better cognitive scores also tended to have lower levels of inflammation and healthier immune cell patterns.
- In other words, as the immune system improved, so did brain function — at least for some participants.
This supports a growing theory in medicine: that the immune system plays a major role in brain health. If you reduce chronic inflammation and support immune balance, you may improve cognitive function, even in conditions like Alzheimer’s.
What Were the Limits of this study?
Like any early-stage study, that reveals novel data, the authors pointed to the limitations that existed.
- It was a small sampling (started with 34 people with 26 who completed the 12-month study)
- It didn’t have a control group to compare against
- Other factors like diet, medication, and exercise weren’t controlled
However, even with those limits, the results are strong enough to say: this is worth studying further.
Final Thoughts
Alzheimer’s disease affects millions of people — and there’s still no cure. And treatment optins are limited. But this study shows that nutrition and immune support may open a new path toward better brain health.
APMC, the acemannan-based supplement, not only showed signs of slowing cognitive decline, but also brought the immune system into better balance — something most current treatments don’t address.
This is a scientific step forward — one that deserves more attention.
This Curator Conjectures
What if we spent a lifetime proactively caring for our immune system—and addressing the chronic inflammation that so often goes unnoticed—could we reduce, delay, or even escape the grip of dementia altogether? It’s a question worth asking, and one that science is just beginning to explore in earnest.
Before I bring this video to a close I am adding here an important update and edit. One of the authors of the 2013 study H. Reginald McDaniel (fondly referred to as Dr. Reg), who I have since met and had lunch with talked about this very study in a video you can access at this link. But let me summarize his comments here.
Remember, the study is titled “The Effect of an Aloe polymannose Multinutrient Complex on Cognitive and Immune Function in Alzheimer’s Disease.” This is the original screenshot I used of the study and only includes 4 authors names. But I went to the Journal of Alzheimers Disease and found the same study. But this one listed all the authors, a total of 12 authors. And Dr. Reg’s name is listed here. Dr. Reg gives a great deal of credit to John Lewis who not only led the study but later did a TED talk on the findings, an edited version of which can be accessed at the bottom of this web page.
At minute 5 Dr. Lewis starts talking about Acemannan (polysaccharides and monosaccharides of the aloe plant)
At minute 8 he talks about Alzheimer’s and mentions this particular Acemannan study in his presentation.
At minute 9 he mentions proliferation of adult stem cells using Acemannan.
It’s important to know that What often goes unrecognized is how difficult it was to even get this kind of a study approved. Five separate organizations that served Alzheimer’s patients refused to participate—simply because this was a nutritional intervention, not a pharmaceutical drug.
But The Miami Jewish Health Service—home to the largest retirement center on the East Coast—opened its doors. With over 150 dedicated Alzheimer’s beds and an extensive outpatient program, they agreed to participate when others would not. A single family, devastated by the loss of five loved ones to Alzheimer’s disease, provided the funding to make the research possible.
The results were remarkable. In this required safety study of an initial 34 patients, not only was there zero toxicity, but immune activation was observed. Memory and cognitive improvement occurred in 46% of the patients (which I pointed out), and another 23% showed no further cognitive decline (which I missed first time through)—representing a 69% overall benefit in this pilot study.
But perhaps the most powerful testimony came from the caregivers themselves. Staff members reported this was the first time in their careers they had ever seen Alzheimer’s patients improve. Their outlook changed. They began coming to work with anticipation, eager to see what new improvements might appear that day.
For those caregivers, this study didn’t just affect patients—it restored hope, purpose, and a renewed sense of possibility in their daily work.
And as was already mentioned: This is a scientific step forward — one that deserves more attention
I hope you will always be careful to maintain good works to meet urgent needs and become heroes to your generation.
I’d like to give you some empowering information, and I hope you will feel as excited about it as I do.
If you didn’t realize it already, this country has an epidemic of chronic diseases.
The concept that I’m gonna present to you tonight is nothing new.
It’s nothing novel.
This has been around longer than our calendar.
Hippocrates, the father of modern medicine said, let food be your medicine.
James Lind, the captain of the British Navy, the Royal Navy in the seventeen hundreds when the British was dominating the world, and he discovered that lemons, limes, and oranges could be used to prevent and cure scurvy.
This was two hundred years before vitamin c was even identified.
So everybody does anybody know that?
Did anybody know that?
Few people did?
Good.
So what I’m talking about tonight is using nutrition as a foundational approach to health, using nutrition, the power of nutrition to be healthy.
There are lots of concepts that go into the idea of being healthy.
In my opinion, the first three, the most important three are eating a predominantly whole food plant based diet, exercising most every single day, if not every day, and supplementing with nutrients that are typically not found in the modern diet because we have had problems with our food supply over the last one hundred years, and so it’s important to supplement with some key nutrients.
And that’s what is the most exciting part of my talk that I will talk about tonight.
Now if you do not understand or if you have no appreciation or value for nutrition in your life and how that affects your health, I would say to you that it’s probably not the least of which due to all the funding all I’m sorry.
All the advertising, all the marketing money that’s been spent by the pharmaceutical industry to convince you that pharmaceuticals are needed to manage your health.
Right?
There are millions and billions of dollars.
I mean, just turn on the TV.
You see commercials all the time promoting the use of drugs.
This is not our health.
This is treating and mitigating chronic disease.
At the same time, we are spending over $2,000,000,000,000 every year on what we call our health care system.
Would everybody do me a favor in this room tonight?
Stop calling it a health care system.
We treat and manage chronic diseases primarily in this country.
This is not a health care system.
Health care, what does that mean to you?
What does that mean to any of us?
It doesn’t mean taking pharmaceuticals.
It means caring for our health.
Pharmaceuticals are used to treat and mitigate and manage chronic diseases.
Look at this graph.
We are spending all this money, and yet somehow we are not even close to the to the leading country when it comes to life expectancy.
There are so many other indicators of quality of life.
We’re not even close to the top.
Why are we spending all this money?
How are we spending all this money on an unsustainable effort when we are not even close to the leading countries with some of these markers of quality of life?
You are probably also thinking that you are predisposed or you are a victim of your genes.
That is absolutely a fallacy.
Genes are like a gun.
They do nothing until they take in an information from the environment, and then they do something.
And we hope that they do something good for us, not express a disease.
We want them to express good things, so please don’t think that you are a victim or you are have an inevitable situation when it comes to your genes.
Folks, there is also no magic bullet.
There is no genius at the University of Miami.
There is no genius at Harvard, Yale, anywhere else coming up with a magic bullet for our pill popping society to prevent and reverse, conditions that have resulted in thirty or forty years of bad behavior on our part.
You have to manage what you do every single day.
If you do not know these numbers, roughly seventy percent of our nation now is either overweight or obese.
Does anybody not know that?
And this is a very recent phenomenon.
This has only happened within the last fifty or sixty years.
Ladies and gentlemen, our genes just didn’t decide to say in the last half century, it’s time for us to get fat and sick.
Seriously.
I’m not even trying to be funny with that.
But guess what?
It rises it it the rise in this overweight obesity trend parallels what has happened with the fast food industry.
We have this enormous rise in all these companies now that produce fast food.
So what happened to us?
We are now overfed and are undernourished.
We’re eating food like substances as Michael Pollan says.
He said it very brilliantly.
Food like substances.
It’s no longer food.
And even the food we eat now today, even if it’s good food, chances are if you don’t buy organic, you’re buying food that’s been genetically modified.
It’s got all kinds of herbicides, pesticides, etcetera, added to it.
So the quality of our food today is not what it was a hundred years ago.
All this leads to chronic inflammation.
Chronic inflammation is rampant throughout the medical literature.
It’s it’s known now to be a predisposing factor to all kinds of chronic diseases, the ones that I just mentioned, and I’ll talk a little bit about how we can prevent that here in just a second.
My colleagues and I, what we are doing loosely is part of the the branch of science called glycomics.
You’ve probably heard of proteomics.
You’ve probably heard of genomics.
Well, we’re doing things in the in the field of glycomics.
So we’re studying monosaccharides.
We know that these monosaccharides are very important to our foundation of health, particularly mono mannose, I’m sorry, is is a sugar is a is a saccharide that’s found in aloe vera.
This aloe vera has been used aloe vera has been used for thousands of years by humans.
Right?
I mean, who everyone knows that aloe vera is top you think of it as being used topically, of course, when you have a burn or a cut or something like that.
But, actually, it’s just as just as potent, if not more potent, when you take it take it orally.
So what we know now through the study of glycomics is that many molecules of mannose are needed for the bioengineering of life, for all the cellular synthesis functions, everything that you need to produce good products.
So when you think about analogy of a of a manufacturing process, an assembly line, you need certain nutrients, certain raw materials to go in, and that’s exactly what we do when we give mannose in in high doses or high amounts that normally you would not get in the average diet.
So you may be thinking to yourself, okay.
That’s great.
So what do I do?
How how can I get these things?
Well, again, I just mentioned aloe vera.
If you have, I don’t know.
I think you guys some got some sort of a a goody bag, if I can call it that, some sort of a sample.
I think you were given something, and you have a product that I’ll mention just briefly very quickly, but I’ll talk about that when I get to the results of this, study that we just published earlier this year.
So aloe vera, again, is very high in this particular nutrient.
It’s very crucial because of the way it works in all of our cells and every aspect of our lives.
So a colleague of mine had a patient who had gone through all the standard conventional treatments.
He had gone through surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy.
He was given up for dead.
He was sent to hospice.
He had metastatic tumors throughout his body, particularly in the liver.
If you look at this graph, can see in July 1999, after he had had all the conventional treatments, he got started on the monosaccharides.
A year later, you can see how much the tumor was reduced.
Folks, this man is still alive today.
How about that?
Yes.
I know some of you may may be thinking this is medical heresy.
It’s not medical heresy.
This is giving the body the the raw materials it needs to function properly.
This is allowing the body to do what it is intended to do.
I don’t care if you believe in evolution or creation or some combination.
This is much more fundamental than treating disease with drugs.
This man is still alive today.
Hallelujah for him.
The study we published earlier this year is gonna blow you away too, I think, because every if you haven’t already been affected by somebody with Alzheimer’s disease, you probably will.
We are an aging population.
Are gonna be so many more people coming down with Alzheimer’s disease.
There is currently no treatment, no cure, no preventive strategy for Alzheimer’s disease.
We took a sample of people with moderate to severe Alzheimer’s disease.
We put them on these monosaccharides.
After nine to twelve months, they started having improvements in memory and cognitive functioning.
Show me something else like that in the literature.
The best that drugs can do are delay decline for a couple of months.
We actually had people coming out of the ether.
We actually had people coming back remembering their sons and their daughters, remembering their significant other, remembering their spouse.
I had caregivers calling me and saying, John, I can’t believe it.
My wife is back.
She remembered my name.
It gives me chills just even telling you guys.
It’s powerful stuff.
What we also showed I’m sure everybody knows there is a debate about embryonic stem cells.
We have taken that debate out of the equation because what we showed is that these monosaccharides stimulate the proliferation of their own adult stem cells.
There’s no need for transplantation or for embryonic stem cell work.
We’ve showed that these nutrients, again, give the raw materials the body needs to function properly.
We are constantly assimilating cells, particularly the adult stem cells, and we want these guys to migrate out where there’s damage and repair it.
We also showed, if you remember back to the inflammation slide, that we reduced inflammatory factors as well.
So not only did we improve cognitive functioning, we reduced inflammation, and we proliferated adult stem cells.
Show me another study in the literature like it.
There’s nothing else out there for people with Alzheimer’s disease.
Finally, you have the power.
It’s up to you.
You do not have to think I’m gonna be dead from chronic disease.
You can do something about it.
I’ve given you some tools.
I’ve given you some information.
All you have to do is decide right here that health care is what you do every single day.
It’s what you do day after day on a consistent basis.
It’s not going to a clinic or a hospital once a year and having your blood drawn and having your blood pressure checked.
You can take ownership of it.
I’ve given you some tools to do it.
Thank you for your attention.