Interesting story on the BBC the other day:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/he...000/1909075.stm
suggesting that a childhood diet high in carbs may lead to shorsightedness. (Not to mention all the other grief!)
I'm myopic, all right, have been wearing glasses since about 8 years old.
I don't suppose going low-carb would reverse the damage? Once the eye grows into that football shape, it's presumably not likely to change.
How many folks out there are shortsighted, then?
Zan

Me! And remember, they told us to eat carrots!!!!

I've been wearing glasses since the age of 8 as well. And all I ate when I was a child was carbs. Cereal, bread, cookies, candies. My staple meal was bread (white, of course!), milk and brown sugar!

I'm afraid you're right about there not being a reversal process.

My boyfriend has been LCing since the end of August (2001) and I have been following this WOL since the beginning of that same month - both of us have seen improvements in our eyesight. My new prescription is weaker than the one from two years ago, and he now has 20/25 vision in both eyes (one had grown weaker than the other over the last few years).

Nat

I saw something about this on the news yesterday. I've worn glasses since the age of 8 as well. My vision was so bad that while the carbs may have made matters worse, I don't think they were dominant. My vision was 20/800 and 20/2000 with high astigmatism. I say "was" because, after five years of waiting and researching and debating, I took the plunge and had Lasik done just before Christmas. Am very pleased with the results. My right eye - the one that was 20/800 but that had the worst astigmatism - is almost right on. It is slightly overcorrected. My left eye is at about 20/35.

I can pass the driving test without glasses although I'm still wearing glasses full time, but that is because my left eye is still noticeably better with correction and because my eyes don't like to work together too well since one is slightly far-sighted and the other is slightly near-sighted. I had similar problems with this prescription at first but I adapted pretty well and I'm sure I could adapt (eyes get to working together) if I just ditched the glasses.

I go in for my second pre-op exam on Monday. They are planning to do an enhancement to bring both eyes right into the money and there is a very high success rate on the enhancement surgery because the correction is so minor and because they have actual information on how your particular eyes heal.

I'll probably have the surgery in about a month. But now I have to worry about how my low-carb lifestyle will affect it. Hopefully ten weeks on low-carb will have allowed for most of the effect and everything else will get lost in the noise.

Bill, from what I've been reading correcting the imbalance of Omega 6 to Omega 3 EFAs that exists w/in most of us is the cause of this correction. Omega 3 EFA's help to improve/correct vision. It stands to reason that our increase of this particular EFA would have an impact on our vision - it certainly is impacting elsewhere.

Nat

I love this WOE, but I don't know about this. I had been wearing glasses since I was a toddler, I basically don't remember when I didn't have them.

I was off the charts. I wasn't considered 20/anything, (I couldn't even see the big E on the chart without glasses). They used "fingers" to measure my vision. That is where they stand X amount of feet away and ask you how many fingers they are holding up, I was 2 fingers (not sure how far away that equates to).

In 99, I had Lasik and now my left eye is 20/40, and my right eye is 20/20, giving me 20/20 vision. I never need anything to help me see - and this is a wonderful thing

My question then...if you have a farsighted child...do you just feed him lots of sugar so his eyes will become normal? I don't think that's the answer. But my one chubby child is also farsighted, and would love to not have to wear glasses. Lasik surgery? Bill, you are brave. I am glad it worked out for you. It's amazing what they can do now a days. As for me....I never had vision problems until I hit 37! And I've been a carb addict for a LONG time. The eye doctor said I was "at that age" which really burned me. I rebelliously ignore my need for glasses. (I may be a Gramma, but I can't stand wearing my bi-focals.) Victoria

victoria, as much as I like to pretend I'm not vain (lol), I'd probably not wear my bifocals if they didn't make them "line-free" as they do.

I too am nearsighted--badly in one eye, barely in the other. (I had a condition that, ten years after I was born, was correctable without surgery, but when I was a kid, the treatment was unknown.) The odd thing about vision and carbs now is that, when I've eaten more than about 5 grams of sugar (a mint or half piece of gum will not do this to me), I swear that my eyesight changes for the worse for about 48 hours afterwards. This does NOT sound like good news to me (geesh, do I have undiagnosed Type II? my fasting blood sugar was 97 a year ago, so that suggests not). It's an odd experience, too--suddenly my glasses seem not to fit, and I'm squinting to get words on a page to swim into focus.

Anyone else have that one?

razzle, I've had the suddenly out of focus experience too (and my blood sugar is, apparently, fine -- don't know the numbers, but I was told by a doctor, who looked a bit disappointed, that "well, your body processes sugar and fat very well.)

It happens whether I eat sugar or not, though.

About a year ago in my eye exam, my prescription had weakened drastically -- after remaining stable for 40 years! I was fine looking through the doctor's whatchamacallit, but when I got home, I couldn't see anything -- not near, not far, not middle. So I went back, and it was, magically, what it had always been. "You must be diabetic!" he said. I went to another doctor and the same thing happened -- she, however, noticed that the lens was steamy, hence blurring my vision.

It made me think this all may not be an exact science

Thanks, Nat, for the info about the omega 3s. THAT makes more sense!

I, too, have needed corrective lenses since I was 8 years old. When I was in college, I opted for contact lenses and for the past several years, I've worn bifocal contact lenses. Even with them, I still use the magnifying reading glasses when I do close work like counted cross stitch.

I am too "chicken" to do the lasik surgery. I don't want them shaving anything off for fear that I may someday need it. I like the idea of the contact lens that they insert like they do for cataract surgery. I don't think that is available here yet.

As for what I ate as a child, I think that didn't play a role. There were seven kids in our family and only two of us wore glasses as children. Others got them at that middle age when your arms aren't long enough to read the newspaper. We all ate the same foods, and our mother and father didn't wear glasses either.

Yeah, I just can't imagine the diet having a strong influence. I hate these studies that "show a link". I can do a study that "shows a link" between playing badmitton as a child and having strokes at the age of 90. How MUCH of a link? How MUCH of an effect? I discount any study that isn't willing to answer those two questions and that hasn't been able to independently verify the results.

Many of these "studies" are done by looking at a single large sample of people. No matter how large the sample, there are going to be variations in every parameter and purely coincidental correlations in the data. So what you do is you duly note the apparent correlations and then you take another, independent, sample of people and see if those same correlations hold.

When I was taking prob/stats, our prof told us about a classis misuse of correlations. It seems that some grad student noticed a correlation (back in the 60's or 70's, I think), and a pretty strong one, between a student's performance on the ACT and the altitude of the testing center where they took it. They took several samples and they all showed a similar correlation. The higher the testing center, the worse the performance. Soon, all kinds of "experts" were on the bandwagon about how the lower oxygen levels at even modest elevations having a very noticeable impact on intelligence. Finally, another grad student somewhere else thought to test this hypothesis by seeing if the effect held for other measures (which, apparently, no one else had bothered to do before becoming a "talking head"). So he repeated the analysis but looked at the SAT - and sure enough, there was a pretty strong correlation - in the OTHER direction! Students at high altitude did BETTER on the SAT. So now he looked at lots of other indicators (the Iowa Basic Skills test and a host of others) and found that the correlations were in the noise.

So then he looked for other correlations involving the SAT and ACT and what he found was that older, more established schools tended to rely on the ACT while relatively newer schools tended to favor the SAT - for a host of reasons most of them having to do with tradition. Well, guess what? This country was settled from the coasts inward and the universities followed that trend as well. The school's at the lower elevations, out of pure coincidence, tended to favor the ACT and the school's in the higher interior of the country favored the SAT. Since most students that go to college do so at local colleges, the highschools inevitably (and usuallyunconsiously) skew their teaching practices toward the test that is more likely to be important to their students.

Even as late as the early 1980's, I remember that this correlation existed. Coming from Colorado, we had practice exams and study sessions and almost all of them focussed on the SAT. I also remember that MIT and other schools that I was applying to back east only accepted the ACT while schools here such as the Academy and the Colorado School of Mines accepted both but always talked in terms of the SAT. I think this distinction has largely dissappeared now and most schools accept either without much of a preference.