While we all know eating carrots won’t give us perfect vision, can what we eat affect our eyesight? Turns out, the food we eat does play an important role in our vision.
Believe it or not, certain supplements in your diet play a vital role in helping you maintain strong vision by preventing complications like color blindness, macular degeneration, bulging eyes, and glaucoma.
So, how does your diet play a role in your vision? Well, some of the nutrients consumed on a day-to-day basis include vitamins (like C and E), carotenoids, and omega-3 fatty acid, which are all supplements that the body needs to function properly. In fact, eating a well-balanced diet based on whole foods should ensure that you’re meeting your body’s daily needs.
Our supposedly healthy diets may actually require some adjusting to get the job done.
Vision and Metabolism
As noted earlier, the nutrients you consume on a day-to-day basis is an extremely important part of the daily lifestyle choices you make. To put it another way, the food you eat and the supplements you come in contact with not only affects your overall health, but your eyesight as well.
A diet that’s high in saturated fat and processed food, for example, will likely increase your risk of high blood pressure, which in turn will affect your vision. However, healthy foods like blueberries, peanuts & almonds, oranges, salmon, turkey, and carrots may help prevent certain eye diseases and other health problems later on down the road.
Diseases like diabetes and other eye conditions like glaucoma have been shown to occur less frequently in people who eat meals rich in vitamins, dietary supplements, and minerals, according to RNIB. That being said, it’s important to include colorful fruits and vegetables in your diet and consume at least five to nine servings of these foods daily, not just weekly.
To further protect your eyes, choose darker green or brightly colored fruits and vegetables. Those are the fruits and vegetables that will allow you to obtain antioxidants. These are substances that not only protects the cells within your body, but also protect your eyes by reducing further damage related to oxidizing agents that may cause age-related eye disease.
Things That Can Be Done to Improve Our Diet
We can all agree that vision is the one sense we rely on the most, and living in a world that requires our eyes to routinely stare at small screens (cell phones, computers, and tablets) it’s important to take steps to help protect them from further damage. One method that could protect your eyes from complications down the road involves dieting. Meaning that before you sit down to eat a meal, take a hard look at the food your body’s consuming.
If the food doesn’t match the color spectrum of a rainbow (blue, indigo, green, orange, red, violet, and yellow) chances are, your body could do without it. Eating things like fruits and vegetables can also improve your overall health and protect to yours from certain diseases.
Another thing you can try is substituting whole milk for two percent milk, or even soy milk. You should also practice eating salad without the dressing.
Eye Vitamins for Improved Vision
Even if you exercise every day and eat a healthy diet that contains lots of fruits and vegetables, you can still do more to protect your eyes by taking daily vitamin supplements.
If you’re like most people, then you’re probably asking yourself “Do vitamins really work when it comes to vision?” and the answer is, it varies. Although some vitamins can be found in healthy snacks like carrots, not all of them produce supernatural results.
This means that getting enough vitamins is important during every stage of your life, especially since life expectancy is down for the first time in decades; living a long, healthy life should be everyone’s top priority. There are a number of benefits for taking vitamins, and maintaining your vision is just one of them.
In the long run, eating right and doing your best to live a healthy lifestyle for your eyes isn’t as complicated as people make it seem. All you have to do is remain balanced and responsible. Go easy on the junk food and eat more rainbow colored food items. Remember that antioxidants help your body reduce the aging aspects of your vision. After all, you only get one set of eyes to last you for a lifetime, so do your best to protect them.
