Think red, green, blue, yellow and orange. Add fish from cold waters nuts and eggs. Maybe some lean red meat and poultry.
That’s the best and easiest way to know which foods are particularly good for eyesight and good healthy eye care.
I’ve learned a lot more about food since having aging macular degeneration. In addition to taking AREDS2, I’ve also changed my diet considerably, with an accent on the reds, greens, blues, yellow and orange colored fruits and vegetables.
At the same time, I have had 11 injections, each four weeks apart. To the shock of the ophthalmologist who is so excellent and knowledgeable about his specialty, as well as to myself, my eyesight has not gotten any worse.
In fact, the doctor, who had told me in the very beginning he was just hopeful of preventing my condition from getting any worse but believing it was too far advanced for him to do anything to improve it, it really seems to be to be somewhat less pronounced.
Either that, or I’m getting used to a new way of seeing the world. But the doctor’s inspections also show a slight improvement.
All of which begs the question: is it because of the Eleya injections and a wonderful ophthalmologist or is my change of diet helping?
As curious as I am about almost everything, the answer to my own question is not important to me. I don’t want to stop either process, the injections or the diet, to find out which it is. I’m quite comfortable right now knowing things aren’t as bad as they were, they haven’t gotten any worse.
If it’s one or the other doesn’t make any difference. I’m continuing on both.
Which brings me to exactly which foods are best? It’s easy to say fruits and vegetables, lots of cold water fish and nuts of all kinds, and yes, lean beef as well. Pretty much runs the gamut.
But the other good news is, the same diet that helps your eyes is the one that also helps your heart, as well as the rest of your body. The reason the same foods help your eyes and heart is because your eyes depend on those little arteries for their supply of oxygen and nutrients in the same way the heart depends on much larger arteries for the same thing.
Last year, 2020, was The Year of the Eye. To celebrate it, the American Academy of Ophthalmology made a lists of the top 20 vision-healthy foods. If they list them by color, the orange fruits and vegetables are loaded with vitamin A, probably the best known eye-healthy nutrient of all. It’s the one that helps your retina turn those light rays into images we can see.
It also keeps the eye moist so there’s no dry eye problem. So think carrots, sweet potatoes, cantaloupe, apricots.
Included among the good yellow things to eat, there are tangerines and oranges, lemons and grapefruit, along with peaches. All are full of Vitamin C, an antioxidant that protects the body from damage from all the bad things we eat and enjoy like fried foods and even tobacco smoke and other things in the environment.
Think red and you come up with beets and apples, tomatoes and strawberries, along with red peppers. All are antioxidant filled so could delay AMD as well as cataracts. Blues are all those luscious berries, especially blueberries, the best of all..
Green of course is the big, wonderful color that’s filled with Vitamin E, that antioxidant that helps keep cells healthy. Think of all the varieties of lettuce, the greener the better, avocado, broccoli, turnip and radish greens, peas, collards, kale, spinach and string beans. These are all particularly great for the macula, that tissue behind the eye that gives us our detailed vision. Eggs are not green except for Dr. Spock’s with his ham, but they’re also full of the lutein and zeaxanthin antioxidants particularly great for the macula.
So they are the colors. Add cold water fish, like sardines and tuna, halibut and trout. Perhaps oysters for a treat.. Or some poultry of any kind. But especially chicken. Try lots of almonds or walnuts, even sunflower seeds, and then think about some foods that will ensure you have enough of the mineral zinc in your body. Zinc seems to help keep the eyes from damage from light. But too much zinc can take away from the copper in your body which you really do need for all those red blood cells. So it’s best to take both, and that can be found in black-eyed peas, kidney and lima beans and pretty much any other kind of bean.
Keeping or improving eyesight makes your view of the world come out in so much more beautiful color!. Use color to protect your vision.
