From the Desk of Dr. Karl R.O.S. Johnson, DC.....

Sleep is what most of us look forward to at the end of a long day, and something many of us feel we don’t get enough of. While there’s still a lot to learn about sleep and why we need it, we're now beginning to understand that sleep greatly impacts the health and destiny of our brains.

Aside from impacting your energy level, sleep seems to play a unique role in the development of Alzheimer's disease.

Whether or not you get enough quality sleep on a daily basis can dramatically increase or decrease your risk for Alzheimer’s. This is a major reason why it’s so important to do everything you can to get the best sleep possible, as frequently as possible.

In addition to impacting your Alzheimer’s risk, sleep has the power to influence how hungry you feel and how much you eat, how fast your metabolism runs, whether you become overweight or stay slender, whether you can fight off infection, how creative you might be, how insightful you might be, and even how compassionate you can become.

With the hectic pace of modern day life, sleep might feel like a luxury you can't afford. However, from a medical perspective, it's absolutely essential to get good sleep if you want to keep your body and brain healthy.

Experts explain poor quality sleep is linked to Alzheimer's disease, so it's important to understand specific ways you can achieve better quality sleep. Here are 10 simple steps you can take to improve your sleep starting today:

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The road to chronic disease — from arthritis to heart disease — is paved with sugar and refined carbohydrates. It’s a freeway that leads straight to insulin resistance syndrome, given the right conditions, most notably being overweight and inactive.

The devastating chain of events that leads to chronic disease goes like this:

• Carbs and sugar break down in the digestive tract to glucose that the body uses for energy.
• Beta cells in the pancreas make and secrete insulin into the blood to ferry any glucose you don’t use to muscle, fat, and liver cells for storage.
• Given the right conditions and more glucose than your cells can manage at the moment, the call goes out for even more insulin.
• Beta cells keep the insulin flowing but eventually the body’s cells can’t absorb it or the glucose building up in your blood stream. That’s called insulin resistance.
• Eventually the beta cells can’t keep up and insulin levels plummet. Now your bloodstream is flooded with glucose, which damages nerves and blood vessels, causes inflammation, and leads to a host of chronic diseases.

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