Best eye makeup EVER.
Wait, that sign has words?? My whole world view was rocked one day in 5th grade when my parents took me to get my eyes checked. It turned out that not only was I near-sighted but I was so near-sighted that the fact that signs contain actual words and not just blurry pictures was a shattering revelation. I remember marching out of the optometrist’s office and reading every sign I could find – just because I could.
Ever since then my consistently worsening vision has provided my family with a trove of embarrassing and hilarious stories. Like the time when I was 16 and jumped on the back of a boy in the swimming pool, thinking he was my brother that I’d been horsing around with. I quickly realized that despite wearing the same color swim trunks as my brother, he was not related to me in any way when he turned his head and said dryly, “Excuse me, can I help you?” I still had my legs locked around his waist when I spotted my brother several feet away laughing so hard I thought he was going to aspirate his own tongue.
The day I got contacts was the third best day of my life, right after my kids’ births, the day I won the science fair and the matinee where I discovered Christian Bale in Newsies. (And yes, my wedding is not on that list. While marrying my husband is the best decision I ever made, our actual wedding day was a disastrous comedy of errors – starting with the mass deaths of all the betta fish I’d bought for centerpieces because I was stupid and thought living creatures made quirky-cute decorations because their fins matched my wedding colors. You know what does not signify the beautiful beginning of a new life together? Dead, rotting fishy corpses. If you learn nothing else from me, just remember that animals and weddings are a bad combo. Except maybe dwarf ponies. Or pot-bellied pigs. I hear they are very smart creatures. They probably could have planned my Big Day better than I did. Ponies and pigs: that will be the theme for any future wedding/renewal-of-vows/overblown excuse for a part-ay I may have. I should totally start a ponies-n-pigs wedding vision board on Pinterest. How has that not happened yet?) ANYHOW. I love my contacts. I’ve worn them every day for the past 20 years. (Except for the two awful weeks I had pinkeye.)
The one downside to contacts (besides not being able to find them when you drop them) is that every 1-2 years I have to go back in and get another eye exam where they always tell me that my eyes have gotten worse and that the price of contacts has gone up. So forgive me for not being excited today when I plopped myself into the big chair to play the which-looks-clearer-one-or-two? game.
“Good news! Your prescription has gone down! By a full point!” Record screech.
“What did you just say?” I squeaked. Even though it just downgraded me from “so blind I’ve walked into an open pool” to “so blind I can’t tell the difference between ornamental grapes and real ones thereby ruining my friend’s artistic display”, I was still pretty pumped. But also leery. “How does that even happen?”
“Your vision isn’t as fixed as people think it is,” the doctor explained to me. “Lots of things can change it – weight loss, weight gain, certain diseases, blood sugar – and it can even vary slightly from day to day.”
“Is this happening because I’m getting old?” I demanded. Everyone knows things start to go wonky with age. It’s why Depends are the same backwards and front ways.
“No,” he answered, “usually your eyesight gets worse with age. It’s very unusual to see it improve by this much.” And then he dropped the bomb on me. “Are you doing a low-carb diet? Like for a New Year’s resolution or something?”
Funny thing: I kind of am. Thanks to the specter of ADHD permeating our entire lives, back in January our pediatrician recommended that we put our kids on what she called “the ADHD diet*.” It’s basically Primal/Paleo eating. No grains, no dairy, no legumes, limited sugar. (This was in addition to the Red 40 diet we were already trying that had us eliminate everything with artificial food dyes and colors.) It’s been a long couple of months. But the diet isn’t really low carb. We’ve been eating lots of starchy veggies (carrots, squash, sweet potatoes, jicama) and fruit. Yet it is pretty low in sugar and very low in processed foods.
The doctor continued, oblivious to the sound of my mind being blown, “Because the lens of your eye absorbs sugar from your blood, the higher your blood sugar the worse your eyesight gets.” He added that he sees several patients each year whose eyesight improves somewhat thanks to going low-carb and/or losing weight.
I’ve heard the link between diabetes and eye problems before. And many research studies have linked high carbohydrate diets – defined as those containing over 200 grams of carbs per day – to an increased risk of macular degeneration, the number one cause of blindness. But does that also mean that by eliminating carbs you can fix myopia? There’s a difference between eating a healthy diet to prevent eye disease in later years and eating a certain type of diet to reverse nearsightedness now.
Is it possible to cure bad vision? I ran home, fired up ye olde laptop, and went a-searching on the interwebs. The answer I found? Maybe.
There are a lot of anecdotal stories of people going primal/paleo and seeing slight to total improvements in their vision. But what about the research? The first problem I encountered is that most of the studies that I looked at didn’t bother to differentiate between types of carbs – and there is a big difference (in my humble opinion) between 50 grams of fruit and beans and 50 grams of, ahem, jelly beans. Another issue is that it’s so difficult to tease apart cause and effect. Lastly, all the studies I found either simply supported the role of a healthy diet in protecting vision or showed a small benefit to vision. I found no studies that said a low-carb diet cured myopia, as in returning the nearsighted person to their 20/20 glory days. Lastly, a significant number of studies have linked vision loss to high insulin levels but can you say that the latter caused the former? Or are they both just a symptom of unhealthy habits?
I’m not the only one confused. As described in an article in New Scientist:
Seven years ago, evolutionary biologist Loren Cordain at Colorado State University in Fort Collins caused a stir by suggesting that myopia may be triggered by the excessive consumption of refined carbohydrates. The study compared diets and rates of myopia in different nations, and it seemed plausible that insulin levels which were raised in response to a high-carb diet could stimulate the eye to grow and become elongated, causing myopia.
This year, two independent studies, led by Frank Schaeffel at the University of Tübingen in Germany and Josh Wallman at the City College of New York, have provided further evidence that insulin can stimulate eye growth. Working with chicks that wore special lenses to provoke myopia, they found that injecting insulin into the chicks’ eyes increased the deterioration in their sight dramatically.
Yet whether this explains the link between diet and myopia remains hotly debated. “Initially we just didn’t believe Cordain’s carbohydrate story, but now that we know that insulin can interfere so much, I am not so sure,” says Schaeffel. Wallman remains more doubtful, arguing that a high-carb diet may not necessarily raise insulin levels in the eye enough to cause damage.
Cordain cites studies which found that people with high blood-sugar levels are more likely to be myopic, and says that insulin levels in the eye do seem to reflect levels elsewhere in the body. High blood sugar may also promote myopia by raising levels of the growth factor IGF-1, a substance which likewise stimulates eye growth, he says.
Mark Sisson put it in context on his post on the subject:
The numbers for myopia, for example, have skyrocketed in the last thirty years across the developed world, and children oddly appear to be the hardest hit. Singapore is often cited as the worst off. As many as 80% of 18-year-old military conscripts exhibit myopia as do 20% of children under seven and 70% of those graduating college (PDF). In Sweden, 50% of 12-year-olds have myopia (PDF).
In the U.S., the prevalence of myopia is 42% in people 12 to 54-years-old and 34% in 12 to 17-years-old. As for other visual impairments, more than 17% of people over the age of forty are diagnosed with cataracts. For age-related macular degeneration, it’s more than 6%. For diabetic retinopathy, there’s another 3.4%. For glaucoma, it’s about 2%. Add it all up, and that’s a whole lot of us voted off Grok’s island.
That’s a lot of people stumbling blindly into pools…
Just for funzies, I also Googled research on vegetarian diets curing myopia and found a similar mix of anecdotal success stories and links between high vegetable intake and vision improvement. While the two don’t necessarily contradict each other – vegetarians and the primal crowd definitely intersect in the veggie patch – it did tell me that people are good at spinning research in whatever direction they want it to go.
Yet I could not ignore the fact that I was reading all this cool info with my new lower-powered contacts. Something had changed and my diet is a likely culprit.
Sisson points out that carb intake is just one of many nutritional factors that could effect vision. Other ways you can use food to help your eye sight:
– Breastfeed. Mommy mammary juice appears to offer some protective benefit against myopia. Talk to your mom and see if she’s still lactating. If not, this ship has probably sailed for you (and me – right Mom??)
– Eat more fish. Getting plenty of omega-3 fatty acids in your diet reduces the risk of developing macular degeneration and can even stop it from getting worse.
– Cut out high glycemic carbs, particularly refined grains. (See all the study links above)
– Eat lots of fruits and veg. One study showed that people whose antioxidant intake was high were less likely to develop lens damage and certain kinds of cataracts.
– Especially greens. A Florida International University study found that greens contain a lot of lutein which they found to be protective of vision.
– Drink wine or eat red grapes. This study suggests resveratrol may help prevent diabetic retinopathy and AMD.
But there are non-food options as well. In all my searching, I also came across this bit of new research that showed that athletes playing an app called UltimEyes improved their vision to be better than 20/20. So apparently there is a mental component to go along with the dietary one. Of course I wanted to immediately try out this app myself but it’s not available for Android. Wah wah. But their conclusions are fascinating:
This week the peer-reviewd journal Current Biology published the results of those trials. Players who participated in the training enjoyed a 31 percent improvement in visual acuity. Seven players actually got down to 20/7.5 vision—they could read a line from 20 feet away that a normal person can only read from 7.5 feet away—which is very rare.
“Players reported seeing the ball better, greater peripheral vision and an ability to distinguish lower-contrast objects,” Seitz said.
Tonight, as I sit here bloated from my research binge, it seems the relationship between diet and vision isn’t as simple as my doctor made it sound. Yet it seems clear that the incidence of myopia is getting worse worldwide and that there is a link between diet and vision – and that vision is more malleable than I thought!
At the end of my appointment, I asked my optometrist what I could do to make my eyes keep improving and he answered, “Whatever you’re doing, just keep doing that! Oh, and don’t age.” Eating whatever and building a time machine. Got it!
What about you – how is your vision? Has it changed over the years? Has anyone else seen a link between vision and diet?? And has anyone else had a terribly embarrassing moment thanks to not having their glasses or contacts?
*For the record, while I saw a big improvement by taking out artificial food dyes, I saw zero change in my kids with the additional restrictions. Even the big bad gluten didn’t seem to make any difference for them in concentration or activity level. We’re a sample of six, so take that for what you will.
Much like Edward Cullen I am over a hundred.
But my vision has improved. In two ways.
Way back in college, one day I sat close to the back of a lecture hall with my girlfriend/soon to be fiance/soon to be ex fiance and I uttered wondered aloud why the prof was writing sooo tiny on the board. Kind of ridiculous for a place this size, with seats this far back and…
I was interrupted by said girlfriend/soon to be yet another heart-breaker…taking off her glasses and placing them on my face.
Oh.
That’s better.
Mind you, I could still read the words without the glasses…but it took effort.
I only needed glasses for detailing things at a distance. I could see everything okay…but if I wanted specific detail…then the glasses were needed.
Then I got older…it got a little worse. My eye doctor was impressed because I came to him saying I had noticed a difference, and he told me the difference that was in in my eyes most people would not notice.
Then I went for a while not wearing my glasses. Didn’t need the distance details for a while.
When I went back for an exam, he told me they got stronger for seeing things at a distance, but weaker for reading small print.
Great. So now I had TWO pairs of glasses.
Recently, I went to read some small print and dutifully got out my small print glasses…and I could read the tiny print better without them.
Odd…but welcome!
Embarrassing moments?
Well apparently I have this “look” that says: “I can kill you with two fingers if you look at me funny.”
Which works great in some roles in acting. Or to dissuade bad guys.
But…
…OTHER times…
…that look simply means…
I am thinking.
Or…
I forgot my glasses.
Or…
I am thinking about where I forgot my glasses.
And people leap out of my way or abruptly cross to the other side of the street.
Accidentally and unintentionally traumatizing people can be embarrassing.
“Ponies and pigs: that will be the theme for any future wedding/renewal-of-vows/overblown excuse for a part-ay I may have.”
But if you lost your contacts…large dogs and hairless cats COULD be substituted for the dwarf ponies and pigs.
Oh! Oh! Oh!
And a supplemental note on your LAST post re: your “unattractive” picture.
*Using my best Spanish accent*
“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
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Wow! That is really interesting. I have terrible eyesight–my contact prescription is -6.00 in one eye, and -5.75 in the other eye. Mine hasn’t changed (for the worse OR the better!) in about 10 years. I can’t think of any one embarrassing moment, but I did once knock my glasses off my nightstand in the middle of the night, then get up to put on my glasses so I could find them (wait…).
How do you find the diet is helping your kiddos? That’s something I’ve always been interested in, as a teacher and a health/fitness aficionado.
I am doing (and loving) Trim Healthy Mama (dh lost 40, I lost 20 and we are eating better than ever…). Basically it’s good healthy protein paired with EITHER good fats, OR good carbs, but never mixing the two. I feel GREAT. We cut out ALL sugar, I cut out all wheat, although you can used sprouted or fermented, but breads are my jelly beans, so its easier to just avoid… I’m healthy, happy, MUCH smaller, and BLIND AS A FREAKIN’ BAT! Ok, many not THAT blind. I have 9 pairs of cheater glasses laying around my house in strategic spots. They are the ones you get in packs of 3 at WalMart. They are all +1.25. But I recently had to switch to +2.00 for work and on the computer. I wear them down on my nose. Like a little old lady. I can’t see my papers without them, but can’t see my students with them. At least they aren’t on a chain around my neck! (yet) I was hoping cutting sugar would help my eyes, but so far… nope.
You and I have a similar developmental history, Charlotte. The day I got my first pair of glasses, I was so excited to pick out all the different leaves on the trees. At 21, I got laser eye surgery and my eyes worked pretty well for a few years, until I noticed a certain bluriness returning. I saw an optometrist who diagnosed mild near-sightedness. I asked him whether I had the surgery too early or whether something else had caused my eyesight to degenerate. He asked me if I did a lot of reading or writing. Well, I had just defended my PhD thesis three months prior to that appointment. There’s your problem, he said. People who spend a lot of time looking at objects very close to them tend to lose their ability to see things that are very fair away. Another reason to avoid going to graduate school, folks!
I experienced the same amazement of how clear the world was once I got my first pair of glasses in the 2nd grade. Leaves on trees! Blades of grass! Amazing. And getting contacts in 7th grade was also a major highlight of my life. I swam competitively and it made a huge difference to finally be able to clearly see the wall. I always only wore contacts during the day, but as I’m getting older I like to switch it up with my glasses.
My eyes too have become progressively worse with age. The doctors I’ve seen in the past several years are hesitant to change my lens prescription until there is a drastic difference due to the amount of computer and close, small-sized work I do. I’ve never had an improvement in my prescription, but I am pretty happy when it just stays stable.
Not trying to rain on your parade, but it’s NOT unusual for a myopic patient in their mid to late 30s to suddenly find their myopia decreasing.
As a child/young adult, your near focusing system is VERY strong and often can over-engage itself, which can make you seem more myopic than you actually are(or can cover up hyperopia in young children which is why I will often re-check the refraction after a dilation). In addition, myopes love minus. I could, if I’m not careful, easily over RX my myopic patients and they love it.
As you are in your mid 30s and up, that near focusing system is wearing out(it’s decline is why people start wearing reading glasses in their 40s), so your eyes start relaxing into their actual refractive state.
I’m an optometrist btw.
I cracked up at this Tamara… I love hearing the psychology of nearsightedness and suspect I’m one of those “myopes who loves the minus.” I wonder how many of us were introverted types who had our noses in books most of our childhoods?
Hi Crabby!
I also had my nose buried in books much of my childhood! But I lived on the prairies. The kind of prairies of which it has been said; “A person can watch their dog run away for three days.”
Our house was at the edge of the city. So I had access to a fairly unobstructed view when I went to play outside.
I only had problems in university…studying…doing plays having rehearsals from 6 am until 1 am with classes between. I did not have the balance of being outside as often.
Wow! Life really IS about the balance.
This blew my mind! I’d never thought you could improve your vision once you messed it up, or that sugar could effect your eyes so much. Although,now it seems fairly obvious because it actually happened to me. I’ve always been mildly far-sighted. I can read things up close, but I get a headache if I don’t use my glasses. I once took this awful class that had me sitting indoors with crummy fluorescent lighting for 6 hours a day. It was a boring, tedious class and I spent the whole time ignoring the pointless lectures (you should bathe every day if you work in a medical office! Let’s spend three hours talking about our feeling because one student couldn’t take this crap and left in a huff!) by reading novels under my desk. After a few months of this, I noticed my distance vision having problems. Signs were becoming blurry. I was mad, and upset nearly to tears. Not only had that class wasted $3000 of my money and countless hours of my time, but it was ruining my near-perfect vision! However, it’s been about 2 years since I finished that awful class and my vision is now back to normal.
I’m almost certain this positive change was brought about by less strain and not diet, though. I know I eat more carbs and sugar now than when I was taking that class.
Huh. That’s all pretty interesting! Especially the app. Although in my case I think I’m screwed. My contacts are -11.0 Without glasses or contacts by the time I get something close enough to focus on, my eyes are crossed. Guess I might as well keep eating what I like since I don’t think there’s any fixing that! (Not even with surgery since apparently my vision is so bad I’m not a candidate for laser surgery.) But I will keep that app in mind since while luckily my vision hasn’t gotten any worse in years, if it does get much worse I won’t be able to wear soft contacts and I hate hard ones. They don’t make soft contacts in a much higher prescription than this.
Wow, learned so much from this post and the comments as well!
I’m sort of used to not seeing well, even with my contacts… they don’t correct my astigmatism, but I don’t like glasses and am not fond of the progressives I bought. And I’m temporarily avoiding reading glasses by wearing contacts that undercorrect the myopia in one eye so I can read with it. So if my distance eye is momentarily blocked I am screwed because I can’t see much of anything more than a few feet away with my “reading” eye.
Will keep the nutritional advice in mind though–fortunately it’s mostly stuff I’m already doing.
I was interested to read this post, as for the last year I’ve been involved in an experiment to improve my myopia which I’ve had since the age of 10. I’ve actually had great success — I went from wearing -2.5/-3 contact lenses a year ago, to being able to read the 20/20 (or occasionally even 20/15) line on a vision chart (naked eyes, in good light). No surgery needed….I’ve just been using the opposite lenses that a myope would normally use when I read and use the computer. In other words, using reading glasses. I got the idea from this blog post: http://gettingstronger.org/2010/07/improve-eyesight-and-throw-away-your-glasses/.
It takes hard “work” (the determination to really push yourself to read where things are a bit blurry for some time almost every day), but someone tenacious like you, Charlotte, might well have success with this, as I have. I’d really recommend taking a look. Diet, by the way, is perhaps a contributing factor in myopia, but by far the biggest factor is time spent focusing on things close up. In particular, focusing on close-up objects while wearing minus glasses/lenses is a very bad idea.
Good luck to anyone who tries this method — for me, it’d been totally worth it.
When I first got my glasses as I kid, I marveled that trees had leaves! And when I finally got my contacts at age 14, it was one of my best days of my life too!
I am certainly not lo carb (the triathlete laughs) but I’ve been eating the cleanest (whole grains, organic if I can, lots of varied veggies and fruits, lots of beans, nuts, lean organic protein, trying to stay away from sugar, refined carbs, fatty meat, fried food, etc etc) I have been in my life and last year my prescription went down from 4.75 and 5.0 to 4.0 and 4.25, where it has NEVER gone down before.
I am also in the “can barely read the E on the top of the chart category”, and I have no noticable improvement without my glasses, but it’s nice to be slightly less blind!
This is VERY interesting! Last week I had my eyes tested. For the second time in a row, my eyesight has dramatically improved. When it improved three years ago, I figured it was a fluke. But when it improved again this time I decided to look into it. I have been living very low carb since 2005. I lost 100 lbs, kept it off and feel fantastic with excellent blood test results. I never expected that my eyesight could possibly improve as a result….but it certainly appears that this is the case!
In 2004 my eyesight was -4.00 and -3.50
In 2011 it was -2.75 and -2.50
Last week, 2014 it’s now -2.25 and -2.00
I haven’t seen these numbers since my late teens and I am now 57 years old.
I am very excited by this change!
I knew I was much healthier living low carb and this is a wonderful bonus!! I hope this information helps someone else out there.
Eileen
Very interesting post! Had no idea there is such a close connection between the diet and my sight. Will take that in the consideration from now on! Thank you for sharing!
Not related to eyesight so much, but I went to get my eyes checked this week and told my optician that my eyes had been feeling very dry. I wear contact lenses so I’ve been trying hard to be good about not wearing them too long and using eyedrops when they’re really bad, especially when I wake up. Straight away he asked me “have you changed your diet?” I became a vegetarian a year or two ago, no meat no fish. Now I eat meat and fish very occasionally. He told me that I basically wasn’t eating enough Omega3/6 fats (the ones that are in oily fish) – they help make a fatty layer that stops the tears evaporating off your eyeballs. I’m now taking a Omega supplement, and am going to try to eat more oily fish to see if that helps. Also certain types of contraceptive pill mess up the fat layer too – and an even worse effect if you’re a veggie on the pill, as you might expect.
To reduce you eyesight number, it require continuous efforts and proper diet for that foods plays very important role in eyesight improvement, for me carrot worked well to reduce my eye sight. By the way this article is written well. Keep it up 🙂
I am 63 year old woman who has worn glasses since the 3rd grade and have had progressively weaker eyes. I started eating a modified Paleo 18 months ago. I still eat some dairy. No sugar or grains. No processed food and no restaurant food except for very special occaisons. I lost 2-3 dress sizes and much of my belly and gained a ton of energy. I also started a moderate but consistant exercise program. For the last 6 months or so I was having problems seeing with both my contacts and my new eye glasses. I went for my annual eye exam thinking I would end up getting a stronger lense correction. Both eyes were at -6.50.
In the middle of my exam he sat back in his chair and said no wonder you were having problems seeing. You contacts and glasses (less than a year old) are too strong. Both of my eyes have corrected by almost 1 point. He didn’t ask if I had lost weight or changed my diet (probably a dangerous thing to ask a lady you don’t know well) but he did say he hadn’t seen an improvement like this in a patient my age.
I no longer need cheaters to see my sewing or reading the paper/magazines with my contacts and my vision is so sharp and clear with my glasses it’s like when I put on glasses in 3rd grade and realized trees had leaves and weren’t just green blobs.
I’m going to double my paleo efforts – sometimes the little cheat meals get out of hand. And I’m going to really try to talk my daughter into trying paleo – she is overweight and myopic.
Glad to find this website because I was really puzzled by the whole situation. My husband thought the doctor screwed up my perscription, but that was not the case.
Sheri Delvin
Im a 14 year old girl. i have -2.75 on both eyes 🙁 thank you, I’m going to try doing this 😉
“Anecdotes are unscientific, but they are still true.”
-Dr Bernie Seigel
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Thank you, Joshua! I’ve heard and read so much about restoring vision, but this particular nuance I haven’t tried yet, READING with the plus glasses. I even already have plus glasses from my last experiment, but I used them for distance, not reading.