Macular Degeneration: Go Nuts for Your Eyes

by Michael Greger, M.D.

Macular degeneration is the leading cause of blindness in the United States. As a physician, every disease is personal, but in this case particularly so as my 94 year-old grandfather suffers to this day with this debilitating condition. We've suspected that total fat consumption increases one's risk for the disease, but for the first time ever, Harvard researchers studied people in the early stages and tried to correlate all the different kinds of fat with progression of vision loss. They took a few hundred folks, found out what kind of fat they were eating and followed them for 5 years.[5]

They found that overall, the more fat people ate, whether in meat, dairy products or processed baked goods, the faster the progression of the disease, with only one exception: nuts. Those that ate just one or more servings of nuts a week seemed to cut the rate of progression in half. The researchers weren't sure if it was the cholesterol-lowering fiber, the vitamin E, or the copper or magnesium, or whether it was the special anti-inflammatory anti-clot-forming antioxidant phytonutrients in nuts. The hope is that the 8 million Americans suffering macular degeneration may be driven less nuts by their vision loss if they can only be driven to more nuts.

REFERENCES

[5] Archives of Ophthalmology 171:1728.