Robert G. Smith - The Vitamin Cure for Eye Disease

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book is based on my paper Nutrition and eye disease published in the Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine, Third Quarter, 2010. I thank JOM Managing Editor Steve Carter for permission to use the material in the paper. I thank Basic Healths Vitamin Cure series editor Andrew W. Saul for encouragement, and publisher Norman R. Goldfind for his foresight in developing the Basic Health series of books. I thank Thomas E. Levy, M.D., for his generous and helpful words in the foreword. I thank my parents for getting me interested in science, health, and eating right; Joe Cadbury for showing me nature and how to study it; Peter Sterling for our long-term collaboration in retinal circuitry; my colleagues in retinal circuitry for their impassioned pursuit of the truth; and Michael Chaitin for showing me and many others how to get organized.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Robert Smith is a research scientist, focusing on the function of retinal circuitry. He received his Ph.D. and did his postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania, where he was appointed as a research-track scientist. He has continued to work on the circuitry of the retina at the University of Pennsylvania for the last two decades. Dr. Smiths research focuses on the how and why of neural circuits. He studies the signal-processing function of retinal neurons and the circuits they form. He is an expert in the physiology and biophysical properties of neurons and in constructing realistic biophysical computational models of neural circuits of the retina. Dr. Smith has studied many aspects of retinal circuitry, including color coding, singlephoton detection at night, contrast coding, motion processing, and a variety of electrical and chemical signaling circuits in the retina. He has written many research articles published in scientific journals, has served on review panels for grant applications to the National Institutes for Health, and is a regular attendee at international retina and vision conferences. He is an avid photographer of nature and landscapes.

Robert Smiths interest in vision started as a child, from a passionate interest in nature and photography. He taught himself analog and digital electronics as a young adult. He then built a homemade microcomputer and proceeded to learn software. For several years he worked at the University of Pennsylvania as an engineer designing data acquisition hardware and software for neuroscientists. He then worked for several years as a software engineer in the Department of Neuroscience at the University, where he designed graphics software for the serial reconstruction of neural circuits from electron microscope images and became familiar with neural circuits and their function. He went on to graduate school in Neuroscience at the University and wrote his thesis on computational modeling of the photoreceptor-horizontal cell network. Dr. Smith continues to work on this layer of the retina. His work in the circuitry of the retina is unique, utilizing the principles of electronics, software programming, and neuroscience to learn how the retina can see and categorize the visual world. This work is fundamental for understanding how the eye sees, and has helped clinical researchers to better understand the basis of eye disease.

CHAPTER 1

HOW VITAMINS CAN HELP OUR HEALTH: AN INTRODUCTION

I n his book, Doctor Yourself, nutritionist and author Andrew W. Saul describes the recovery of one of his clients from a progressive eye disease. The woman, in her thirties, had been losing her peripheral vision. She had been told by her eye doctor that further loss was inevitable but that nothing could be done about it. She was desperate. After considering her case history and her personal eating habits, Dr. Saul advised her to eat raw foods, especially sprouts, and although she didnt like the idea, she resolved to try it. Saul explained how she could purchase inexpensive seeds and sprout them, eating several jars of different kinds of juicy, crunchy sprouts each day. Although the woman had misgivings and many questions, she gradually learned new eating habits and maintained the raw food diet over the weeks and months that followed. At first she hated eating raw sprouts, but soon learned to eat generous amounts of them prepared in different ways according to her taste. And of course she ate other nutritious food too, like yogurt and chicken, as well as a few selected vitamin and mineral supplements. Eventually she worked up to eating several quarts of sprouts each day along with whatever else made them inviting and tasty. According to her ophthalmologist, her eyesight didnt get any worse over the next few months. Then, gradually, a miracle seemed to happenover a period of many months on this regimen, her eyesight progressively returned, finally becoming almost normal. Without any other treatment, she had recovered.

This book is about how to treat eye disease and prevent its occurrence On first thought this might seem to imply these diseases are caused by the aging process. However, age-related eye diseases have several causes. Some of them are not inevitable but can be prevented. In many eye diseases, normal wear and tear to the eye over a lifetime damages it beyond repair. Our eyes are at a heavy risk for damage because they sit at the periphery of the body and so are exposed to environmental toxins. Moreover, the eye is prone to disease because it is exposed to bright sunlight, which is known to damage biological molecules. Many age-related eye diseases are accelerated by genetic abnormalities that impair the eyes ability to repair itself. Finally, the neural tissue at the back of the eye has a relatively high metabolism and a high content of polyunsaturated fatty acids. This puts it at extra risk for disease. All of these factors can be ameliorated through nutrition.

ORTHOMOLECULAR MEDICINE

Proper nutrition can prevent disease and help you stay healthy. Orthomolecular medicine is the practice of providing essential nutrients in sufficient quantity to prevent and cure illness. When the body is provided with optimal nutrition, it can metabolize food more efficiently to prevent the effects of harmful environmental toxins and disease. With a sufficient quantity of nutrients, such as vitamins and essential macro- and micro-minerals, either in food or supplements, it can stay healthier and prevent, to a large extent, age-related diseases such as cataracts, macular degeneration, and glaucoma. The reason is that vitamins and minerals, when taken along with a nutritious diet, help the bodys maintenance and repair machinery keep its tissues healthier.body needs for the normal processes of life, and taking them in sufficient quantities, orthomolecular medicine can prevent the damage caused by nutrient deficiencies and can help the body recover. Antioxidant vitamins C and E, taken over a persons lifetime in a sufficient quantity with other nutrients such as zinc, can prevent much age-related disease, especially in the eye.

In the popular literature, many authors advocate one or another particularly healthy diet, as in the example above using raw sprouts, or give simple but strict rules to follow: no refined foods such as sugar, flour, or oils, and no red or white meat. Several popular vegetarian diets have been proven to give excellent recovery from age-related vascular disease. Some have further suggested that to discuss the benefits of specific nutrients is a symptom of our dependence on giant food corporations that vie to sell us refined food. After all, there are profits to be made in removing nutrients during the refining process and then adding them back again to provide health! Thus, some would have us believe that because a varied diet of natural foods is enough to keep us healthy, we dont need to, nor should we, categorize our food into separate nutrients.