Diet and Nutrition

Nutrition and eyes

09/12/2000 11:55AM

Question:

information about nutrition & diet and eyes problems, myopia... or eyes diseas.

Answer:

This is a very general question. If you have read something specific about diet and myopia, please write back and one of us will pursue the question further. However, I had not heard of such an association in the medical and scientific literature. When I searched on vitamin A and myopia, I found three citations: one in English (the abstract said nothing about vitamin A). The other two were in French and German, but without abstracts. I have enclosed the link to the reference in German, although from the title, this seems to relate to the use of vitamin A as a drug, rather than as a nutrient.
(See link to abstract below.)
The most important known association between nutrition and eyes concerns vitamin A. Vitamin A serves two different and very distinct functions in the eye. First of all, it is associated with the visual cycle: in the outer rod cells of the retina (the nerve portion of the eye), vitamin A is a component of rhodopsin. Because of the chemical properties of this compound in response to light, adequate amounts of rhodopsin are very important to vision, and since rods are the nerve compoents especially important when there is little ambient (surrounding) light, the earliest sign of vitamin A deficiency is night blindness. Vitamin A is also involved in the process of cellular differentiation, and in the eye this cellular process is very important to the integrity of the cornea of the eye, through which light passes to reach the retina. In severe vitamin A deficiency, the cornea becomes ulcerated and permanent blindness of the eye may result. Eye problems from vitamin A deficiency are mostly recognized in countries of the world where dietary deficiencies cause vitamin A deficiency. Vitamin A deficiency, at least to a relatively mild extent, has been recognized in this country in patients with problems digesting or absorbing fat (vitamin A is a so-called fat soluble vitamin) and in healthy children who acquired measles infection (association of vitamin A deficiency with measles infection can result in more complications). Despite the prevalence of complaints of people in this country of "night blindness", I am not aware that anybody has even shown that poor vitamin A intake contributes to such complaints (or that such people really have night blindness relative to normal people). Nevertheless, the intake of vegetables containing compounds that lead to the formation of vitamin A appear to have beneficial effects on many aspects of health. Therefore, a "healthy" intake of yellow or dark green vegetables is highly recommended. I hope this helps.
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Vitamin A (German)

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Response by:

C. Lawrence Kien, MD, PhD
Professor, Department of Pediatrics
Nationwide Children’s Hospital
College of Medicine
The Ohio State University