Dear Subscriber,
While I was detained, I got to read an excellent book on macular degeneration.
This doctor went to historical records of eye diseases. Macular degeneration in particular, and came to a conclusion that the disease is one of modern dietary influence. He pointed out that the disease was first spotted around the turn of the last century and was rather rarely reported. It then increased in frequency and he was able to correlate the increasing incidence with the degradation of our ancestral diet, particularly, the increasing consumption of refined, fried, processed, and nutritionally depleted “foods”. He made a compelling case.
Problem for me is that the disease runs in my family, I have it, and as you most likely know, I do eat an ancestral diet. Blue eyed people may be more at risk, simply due to less dark pigment to absorb certain activating light frequencies. My dad also had blue eyes.
Clearly there are other factors in today’s world other than failing at our ancestral diet. Perhaps the food is grown on such nutritionally deficient soils that he remains correct. But then that should be reflected in nutritional analyses of blood samples in today’s world, including me. I’ve had some analyses from labs that measure blood vitamin, mineral, essential fatty acid and other levels, and my levels have been generally well within the lab ranges, including omega fatty acids (I am not a fish eater).
So, perhaps we are better at diagnosing the disease than our counterparts were 100 years ago. Afterall, we have better eye diagnostics than in the past. So, the answer is incomplete for me.
On the other hand, I am convinced that diet and nutrition play a huge role in this unkind disease since we know that certain specific nutrients can stay the course of the disease.
Age related macular degeneration, or AMD, is a common disease where the central vision area of the retina, your macula, undergoes cellular degeneration, particularly in a cell layer called the retinal pigment epithelium. 12.6% of Americans 40 and older develop AMD. I would call this problem “epidemic”. (https://www.cdc.gov/visionhealth/vehss/estimates/amd-prevalence.html).