AMA #6: Eye Health, Why We Yawn & Increasing Motivation

If you want to maintain or enhance your vision at all distances, that for every hour or so that you spend looking at things, say, a distance of 3 feet away or less, you want to get at least 1 hour per day total... of looking at things out in the distance or looking at things beyond 3 feet relative to the distance from your eye.

You want to make sure that you view things both close up and far away across your day. Many, many people nowadays spend a lot of time looking at their smartphone, looking at the computer screen, looking at books and paper—in other words, looking at things somewhere between 9 inches away from their face and their eyes, maybe 2 and a half feet away from their face and eyes. This is an unprecedented event in human history as far as we know.

The short direct prescription here is to make sure that you're getting at least an hour or so each day—although, ideally it would be more—of long-viewing, and that could be done by walking outside and avoiding looking at your phone while walking.

If you want your vision to be maintained or even improve, it's going to be very important for you to view things at a distance as well, for ideally several hours per day.

These are animal studies and now 2 human studies exploring how exposure to red light early in the day can offset some of the vision loss related to age-related macular degeneration, or simply age-related visual decline.

There are also large-scale clinical trials involving thousands of subjects that have shown that people—children in particular—who get 2 hours or more of outside time every day have a much lower incidence of myopia.

We've all heard that carrots are good for your eyes. Well, it's not carrots per se that are good for your eyes; it's vitamin A that's essential for the so-called phototransduction cascade.

Most people can get enough of this fat-soluble vitamin we call Vitamin A by making sure that they eat at least some dark green leafy vegetables and that they do that in their closest to raw form—maybe cooked a little bit, but not overly cooked.

Basically, what they found was for people 40 years or older, if they viewed this red light at a distance of about a foot and a half... for a few minutes each week total, they were able to offset some of the vision loss within a particular domain of vision.