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training, a young Serge Gauthier found himself up to his elbows in lecithin. His sleeves rolled up and his arms buried deep in big barrels of imported lecithin, he and his mentor, Dr. Pierre Etienne, scooped up kilos and kilos of the phospholipid like market merchants and handed it over to the families of patients with Alzheimer’s disease (AD). The two researchers hoped that with regular lecithin consumption, the symptoms of AD would dissipate, the result of increased dietary choline. “We had high hopes, at the time, that by giving a lot of natural precursor to a neurotransmitter you could improve symptoms dramatically.” Choline, one of the products yielded in the hydrolysis of lecithin, is an essential precursor for the production of acetylcholine, a neurotransmitter that is found in dramatically low levels in brains of people with AD. Acetylcholine is important in certain cognitive activities, such as learning and memory. Gauthier and Etienne became partners when Gauthier responded to Etienne’s request for a neurologist to help him diagnose patients with AD. The goal of the study was to determine whether choline and lecithin could improve the symptoms that people with AD experienced, by driving the brain’s production of acetylcholine. Although the participants in that study consumed a lot of lecithin, “it did nothing for their memory,” he says sadly. Where treatment with L-dopa (the precursor to dopamine) could successfully reduce the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease, lecithin fell short, “no such thing happened in AD; it was more complex than we thought”.