Jacksonville's Neighborhood Garden

An eye opener!

The Doctor's Office

Vision is easy to take for granted when normal, but if you ask anyone losing their eyesight, you're likely to here that they'd pay a high price to regain or preserve their ability to see.  Fortunately for us, our produce bags offer a great bargain for protection from leading causes of blindness like macular degeneration and glaucoma.

Our eyes are amazing creations that transmit and focus light from the environment through the center of the eyeball and onto the retina at the back of our eyes.  The retina has specialized nerve cells that respond to the light and transmit information through the ocular nerve to the brain where we can interpret our environment.

It is a miraculous process really.  The lens focuses the light on the retina at the back of the inside of the eyeball.  The retina is a thin, delicate layer of nerve cells that are exposed to a significant amount of focused light.  This light can cause damage to our cells as you likely have experienced with a sunburn.  When this happens to the retina it causes macular degeneration, a leading cause of blindness.  Fortunately, our delicate retinal nerve cells are protected by the retinal pigmented epithelium (RPE), which acts like sunblock for the retina.  The pigment in the RPE is enhanced by nutrients like zeaxanthin and lutein which we get from the greens like the spinach in our produce bags!  These nutrients naturally accumulate in the RPE and protect against the damaging effects of the solar radiation, preserving our eyesight.  

Greens are also effective against glaucoma, another leading cause of blindness. It is not completely understood what causes glaucoma, or loss of the optic nerve that carries information from our retina to the brain.  It has been observed, however that eating at least 1 serving of greens/week will decrease your risk of glaucoma by 69%.  If one serving/week can do that imagine what daily greens will do!

We also know that anthocyanins, the dark blue and black pigments found in berries and purple vegetables, protect against vision loss once the disease process has started. Black currants have been shown in trials to stop the progression of glaucoma, presumably by increasing the blood flow to the optic nerve.  The Chinese seem to have observed this phenomenon because a common Chinese medicine prescription for blindness in the elderly is 50-100 goji berries daily.

Hopefully this information has convinced you of just how valuable those produce bags are to you and your families!