Are you hoping to maintain healthy eyes and high-quality sight throughout your life? While you can’t control every aspect of your ocular health, you can adopt safe, healthy habits that reduce your risk of developing a disease, injuring your eye, or losing your sight. Read on for some helpful advice from the team at Vista Eye Specialists.
Diet and Nutrition for Eye Health
Time and time again, research has found that your diet can be influential in lowering your risks for developing eye diseases. Some of the best nutrients to look for at your grocery store include:
- Omega-3 fatty acids lower your risk of dry eye. These fatty acids are found in seafood (salmon, oysters, sardines, herring) as well as walnuts, flax seeds, and soybeans.
- Beta-carotene has been found to help dry eye, improve peripheral vision, and slow macular degeneration. It is a provitamin found in foods like kale, carrots, sweet potatoes, bell peppers, and spinach.
- Vitamin C helps to build healthy blood vessels in your eyes, and may help ward off cataracts. Vitamin C is an ascorbic acid found in oranges, broccoli, lemons, chili peppers, and strawberries.
- Lutein not only safeguards your eyes from harmful blue light rays but also may reduce your risk for diabetic retinopathy, cataracts, and AMD. These carotenoids are found in eggs, lettuce, peas, parsley, and pistachios.
Proper Use and Care of Contact Lenses
Contact lenses are a popular and effective solution for correcting refractive errors, but they do require proper care to keep them safe. Remember to:
- Wash and dry your hands before handling your lenses
- Take out your contacts before going to sleep
- Check your lenses for chips and scratches before wearing them
- Soak your contacts in contact solution to keep them disinfected
Annual Eye Exams with Your Eye Doctor
The best way to take care of your eyes is with regular checkups from an eye doctor. So many of the symptoms of debilitating eye diseases are subtle to start, which means that you can easily miss them. By the time you realize that you have a problem, vision may be irreversibly lost, and a more serious treatment may be necessary when a less-invasive option would have been sufficient if the disease was diagnosed sooner.
A series of comprehensive tests can catch eye conditions and diseases in their early stages. These tests give you peace of mind that your eyes are in good health, and that you are taking all appropriate measures to maintain vision that lasts a lifetime.
Schedule an Appointment
Our eye team boasts some of the best doctors in Culpeper and Fredericksburg, Virginia. To meet with optometrists and ophthalmologists, please call 1-888-393-5264 today to schedule an appointment.
