We all want to eat the kinds of foods that make us feel better, live longer, but there's so much conflicting information out there, so many nutrition opinions.

Welcome to the Nutrition Facts Podcast. I'm your host Dr Michael Greger.

It's my job to give you the information you need to make the healthiest choices

possible. What's the best way to protect one of our most important senses?

We start with a story of two very important plant pigments that help guard against age-related macular degeneration.

Anyone who's ever gotten a sunburn knows how damaging the UV rays in sunlight can be.

Imagine what those same rays are doing to the back of our eyeballs, our retinas. The eye is designed

to take sunlight and focus it like a magnifying glass into the back of our eyes. Thankfully,

we have a layer of cells in our eye called the retinels. of our

thankfully, we have a layer of cells in our eye called the retinal pigment

epithelium that supports and protects our delicate retinal eyesight

machinery. This layer builds up yellow plant pigments from our diet like ziazanthin, which absorbs blue light and protects the retina from the photo-oxyitative damage.

The yellowing of the lenses in our eyes when we get cataracts may actually be our body's defense mechanism to protect our retinous.

In fact, when you go out and surgically remove those cataracts, your risk of blindness from macular degeneration shoots up since you remove that protection.

Instead of trading one type of vision loss for another, instead of pigmenting the front of your eyes with cataracts,

better to pigment the back of our eyes with diet.

The pigment in the back of our eyes entirely of dietary origin, thus suggesting that the most

common cause of going blind in the Western world could be delayed or even averted with appropriate dietary modification.

Where in our diet do we get it? Well, the egg industry brags that eggs are a good source.

But have an egg nearly every day, six eggs a week for three months,

and the pigmentation in our eyes barely moves.

And these were the high-lutine free-range certified organic eggs, not purchased at a supermarket, but a local farm.

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