 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 retinal pigment epithelium that supports and protects our delicate retinal eyesight machinery. This layer builds up yellow plant pigments from our diet, like zeaxanthin, which absorbs blue light and protects the retina from the photooxidative damage. The yellowing of the lenses in our eyes when we get cataracts may actually be our body's defense mechanism to protect our retinas. 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 at a local farm. Instead of getting the phytonutrients from the egg that came from the chicken that came from the corn and blades of grass she pecked on, what about getting it from the source? A cup of corn and a half cup of spinach a day for three months. A dramatic boost in protective eye pigment. Just to compare to the eggs, here's the best that eggs could do, but if you cut out the middle hen and get these nutrients from plants directly you get up to here. What's neat about this study is that they went back and measured the levels three months after the study stopped and the levels were still way up here. So once we build up our macular pigment with a healthy diet our eyeballs really try to hold on to it. So even if we go on vacation and end up eating more iceberg lettuce than spinach our eyes will hold on until we get back. Yes, eggs can increase the xanthin levels in the blood. They also raise bad cholesterol levels and risk of heart disease. Therefore, an egg yolk-based dietary strategy to increase plasma xanthin cannot be recommended and an alternative cholesterol-free food source is desirable like goji berries, for example, which have up to 60 times more xanthin than eggs. Modest dose markedly increases levels in our body in expense of effective safe whole food strategy to increase xanthin in the bloodstream. But we don't need it in our blood, we need it in our eyes. So how about a double-blind, randomized placebo-controlled trial? To preserve eyesight in the elderly in traditional Chinese medicine, people are often prescribed 40 to 100 goji berries a day. But here they just used about 15 berries a day for three months, but still found it could protect against loss of pigment and prevent the buildup of what's called soft rousin, which is just debris that builds up in the back of the eye, both of which are associated with age-related macular degeneration, the leading cause of legal blindness in older men and women, affecting more than 10 million Americans. A note they gave the berries with milk in the studies of the butter fact could increase the absorption of these crotinoid pigments. A healthier way to get the same effect would just be to eat goji berries with nuts or seeds, in other words, goji trail mix.