What I Told Dr. McCullough About Polysaccharides and Brain Health

Polysaccharides, Brain Health, and The McCullough Report

Listen: America Out Loud / Read: The Focal Points

Brain health deserves a physician’s scrutiny, and Peter A. McCullough, M.D., M.P.H., gave my research exactly that on The McCullough Report.  We recorded the conversation on April 22, 2026, and it aired in early May.  We covered what polysaccharides are, what our published clinical trial recorded, and where that trial stops.  I take the formula built on that work every day, and I have eaten a whole-food, plant-based diet since 1999.

A sugar is not a sugar, and that idea anchored much of our conversation.  Polysaccharides (i.e., sugar units linked by glycosidic bonds into long chains) in aloe and rice bran work as signals between cells rather than as fuel.  The aloe molecules at the center of my research are described in detail in my article on aloe polysaccharides.

My path into this research began with my colleague, Dr. Reg McDaniel, who first showed me what these molecules might do.  Aloe gel is mostly water, so the formulation we studied used dried inner leaf material that concentrates its polysaccharides.  Rice bran is stripped away when brown rice is polished white, which is why ordinary diets supply so little of it.  How heat treatment keeps that bran usable is the subject of stabilized rice bran.

What Our Twelve-Month Study Measured

Our study was a pilot, and I gave Dr. McCullough its limits before its findings.  It was open-label, unblinded, and carried no placebo arm.  Its 34 participants already carried a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease when they enrolled.  An uncontrolled design like that describes what changed in those adults, and it leaves the cause of that change unproven.

Every participant consumed four teaspoons a day of an aloe polymannose multinutrient complex for twelve months (Lewis et al., 2013).  Cognition was scored with the ADAS-cog (i.e., the cognitive subscale of the Alzheimer’s Disease Assessment Scale).  Mean ADAS-cog scores in those adults with Alzheimer’s disease were clinically and statistically significantly better at 9 and 12 months than at baseline (Lewis et al., 2013).

Our blood work also tracked immune cells at the start and again at twelve months.  CD14+ monocytes (i.e., immune cells that circulate in blood and can enter tissue) rose from 10.3 percent to 39.8 percent in those adults (Lewis et al., 2013).  That change is an increase of 286 percent, and it was the only cell subset in the study that rose significantly.

Inflammatory signals moved during the same year.  Interleukin-2, interleukin-4, and tumor necrosis factor-alpha all fell significantly in those adults with Alzheimer’s disease (Lewis et al., 2013).  Persistent inflammation is one route by which the immune system reaches memory, and I follow it in inflammation and brain health.

I told Dr. McCullough plainly that no result from that pilot shows a dietary supplement can treat or prevent Alzheimer’s disease.  A study without a placebo group can only point toward questions that a larger controlled trial would have to answer.  Every measure from the study, those that held steady as well as those that moved, is laid out in my summary of memory-related research.

What the Formula Contains and Where the Plate Comes In

The formula pairs the aloe and rice bran with golden flaxseed, sunflower lecithin, wild yam root, tart cherry, N-acetyl cysteine, and calcium silicate clay.  Each ingredient earns its place through published research on what it supplies, not through a promise about any disease.  The clay has its own evidence and its own limits, which I set out in calcium silicate clay.

This was my second appearance on The McCullough Report.  In the first, we took apart the new inverted food pyramid, and that episode is summarized in our conversation about the new food pyramid.  Both conversations returned to the same conviction, which is that the plate comes first and any supplement comes second.  A similar conversation with another physician appears in my interview with Dr. Robert Lufkin.

Learn more about Daily Brain Care or read more about Dr. Lewis.