Protecting your eyesight as you age involves many of the same
commonsense strategies that will help you prevent chronic disease of all
kinds. This includes:
Care for your cardiovascular system.
High blood pressure can cause damage to the miniscule blood vessels on your retina, obstructing free blood flow.
One of the primary ways to maintain optimal blood pressure is to
avoid fructose. Research by Dr. Richard Johnson, chief of the division
of kidney disease and hypertension at the University of Colorado, shows
that consuming 74 grams or more per day of fructose (equal to 2.5 sugary
drinks) increases your risk of having blood pressure levels of 160/100
mmHg by 77 percent!
Normalize your blood sugar.
Excessive sugar in your
blood can pull fluid from the lens of your eye, affecting your ability
to focus. And, it can damage the blood vessels in your retina, also
obstructing blood flow. To keep your blood sugar in a healthy range,
follow my comprehensive nutrition guidelines, exercise and avoid excess
sugar, especially fructose.
Eat plenty of fresh dark green leafy vegetables, especially kale.
Studies have shown that a diet rich in dark leafy greens helps support
eye health, and those with the highest consumption of carotenoid-rich
vegetables, especially ones rich in lutein and zeaxanthin, had increased
vision health.
Get plenty of healthy animal-based omega-3 fat. A study published in the
August 2001 issue of Archives of Ophthalmology found that consuming
animal-based omega-3 fatty acids was protective of your healthy vision.
Unfortunately, due to widespread pollution and fish farming, fish is no
longer an ideal source for omega-3 fats unless you can verify its
purity. My favorite alternative is krill oil.
Avoid trans fats.
A diet high in trans fat appears
to contribute to macular degeneration by interfering with omega-3 fats
in your body. Trans fat is found in many processed foods and baked
goods, including margarine, shortening, fried foods like French fries,
fried chicken and doughnuts, cookies, pastries and crackers.
Avoid aspartame.
Vision problems are one of the many potential acute symptoms of aspartame poisoning.
Quit smoking.
Smoking increases free radical
production throughout your body, and puts you at risk for
less-than-optimal health in many ways, including the risk of decreased
vision.
Relaxing Your Mind and Your Eyes Also Crucial to Optimal Vision
Interestingly, your mind may have a significant impact on how well
you can see. Research by Harvard University psychologist Ellen Langer
and colleagues found that when people were primed to believe they had
excellent eyesight, their vision improved. Likewise, when participants
were told their eyesight would improve with practice, it did. The same
occurred when people adopted a “try and you will succeed” mindset — they
tried, and their vision successfully improved.
Your thoughts can influence how well you see in part because your
mind is the source of much of the stress from outside sources brought to
bear upon your eyes.
Every thought of effort in your mind, of whatever sort, transmits a
motor impulse to your eye, and every such impulse causes a deviation
from the normal in the shape of your eyeball and lessens your foveal
sensitivity.
Therefore, if you want to have ideal vision you must minimize stress
in your mind. Mental strain of any kind always produces conscious or
unconscious eyestrain and if the strain takes the form of an effort to
see, an error of refraction is always produced. So while you cannot
“make” yourself see, by learning to control your thoughts you can
accomplish that end indirectly.
How Relaxation Helps You See
When a disturbing thought is replaced by one that relaxes, your
squint disappears, the double vision and the errors of refraction are
corrected and this is as true of abnormalities of long standing as of
those produced voluntarily. In a fraction of a second the highest
degrees of refractive error may be corrected, a squint may disappear, or
the blindness of amblyopia may be relieved. If the relaxation is only
momentary, the correction is momentary. When it becomes permanent, the
correction is permanent.
This relaxation cannot, however, be obtained by any sort of effort.
It is fundamental that you understand this; for so long as you think,
consciously or unconsciously, that relief from strain may be obtained by
another strain your improvement will be delayed.
That is why RELAXING your eyes and addressing the stressors that
contribute to the stress are the keys to help you recover your vision.
You can read more about this system to restore your vision naturally,
which I personally used successfully to regain my own vision without the
use of glasses or contacts, here.
The program noted above takes time and dedication, but you can
combine it with the Eyeport System — a patented, clinically proven, and
FDA-cleared vision training system, which helps improve your vision
fitness and relieve your visual stress in a far shorter time, about 10
minutes a day. Now, this is not a quick fix if you have a serious visual
dysfunction, but it is a pretty amazing solution for relieving daily
eye stress. Remember, though, you should always check with your vision
specialist prior to any vision therapy.
Temporary conditions may contribute to the strain to see that result
in poor eyesight, but its foundation lies in wrong habits of thought.
Very seldom is the impairment or destruction of vision due to any
fault in the construction of your eye. Of two equally good pairs of
eyes, one will retain perfect sight to the end of life, and the other
will lose it in kindergarten simply because one looks at things without
effort and the other does not.
So in addition to improving the nutrients and antioxidants your
central nervous system and eye receive by focusing on high-quality
nutrition, as discussed above, you can also support eyesight by
optimizing blood flow through relaxation and controlling your thoughts.
Mental strain may produce many different kinds of eyestrain, but there
is only one solution for all of them, namely, relaxation.
