"It's all fun and games ‘till someone loses an eye, then it's just fun you can't see.” James Hetfield
Happy Halloween and I'll be brief for those who still go "trick or treating".
Much of the success of extinguishing the dumpster fire in your gut is what you eliminate from your life; crap food, alcohol, tobacco, burning the midnight oil instead of going to bed, and neglecting stress management.
Often in the case of nutrition, it's tough to quantify success by comparing the effectiveness of how much you're adding to your diet versus what you're taking away.
But one area of your health that can be improved simultaneously with your gut, simply by what you choose to fuel your gut with, is your eyes.
Eating for eye health has a tremendous amount of overlap with what your gut needs to thrive.
Vitamin A, Vitamin C, Omega 3's, to name a few, are incredibly beneficial to your eyes. Your eyes rely on functioning small blood vessels to provide nourishment, much like larger arteries nourish your heart.
Crushing foods containing these vitamins and minerals can produce amazing results. Might you have any personal receipts to support this?
I thought you'd never ask.
A few days ago, this 56-year old, bacteria-filled vessel, otherwise described as my "bag of bones", had an annual eye exam....after a two year hiatus.
Get off me. I tell you all the time I'm not perfect. There's proof.
For the average adult, an eye exam every other year is fairly common. But since I always strive to be special, diabetics are considered "at risk,” and annual exams are the recommendation.
A consistent pattern for my annual exam is typically a slightly worse prescription than the year before. Father time is a formidable opponent when it comes to diminishing eye sight as we make additional trips around the sun.
So skipping an entire year did not have me excited getting out of the car for this year's visit to my new Opthalmologist.
That is until she informed me my vision had not changed in two years.
I'll paraphrase by saying she said "whatever you're eating, keep it up...we don't see this regularly at 56."
I moonwalked out of the eye clinic.
Now back to gut health.
Lately one of my missions in life is to share what I've learned about rehabilitating my gut microbiome.
The toughest challenge is to relay that you don't need to be sporting 2/3rds of a colon to benefit from this lifestyle change.
The benefits can help a much larger swath of people with individual needs that don't involve cancer.
Think again about the rock being thrown into a lake or pond.
We few in the middle of the splash, the smallest concentric circle or ripple, indeed come to the gut health banquet for survival. Some form of disease required this intervention.
We're in the small minority.
Riding the next larger ripple are the folks that might be tickling the edges of disease, prediabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol. Making a change in direction by fortifying your gut will address these concerns as well.
Rippling out further are the surfers who might still have last year's winter coat tethered to their mid-sections that still needs to come off.
A weight loss goal increases the crowd size quite a bit more and focusing on your gut will definitely help with this titanic struggle.
Here comes the biggest ripple of all: the last time I checked, none of us beat age and everything that comes with it.
And who wouldn't like a little more time before you need to permanently affix coke bottle-thick eyeglasses to the end of your nose?
Eye health can be yet another benefit of a good diet that fuels your gut.
And for those of us that habitually sat in the back of the classroom growing up- how do we fuel our guts again?
Add some fiber and fermented foods alongside lean protein with plenty of whole foods to your daily diet.
Do this and you just might fall backwards into better eye health.
As always, thanks for reading,
Jeff
