 Once we preserve the pigment in our retinal pigment epithelial cells, we need to keep them alive, which may be where anthocyanin phytonutrients come in. Anthocyanins from the Greek anthos, meaning flour and kyanos, meaning blue, blue flower, are natural plant pigments that make pansies look purple, and turns green cabbage into purple cabbage, yellow corn into purple corn, brown rice to purple rice, white potatoes to blue potatoes, orange carrots to purple carrots, and turns blueberries into, well, blueberries, and keeps blackberries black. As we age, our critical RPE layer starts to break down, but we may be able to decelerate that aging with blueberries. Here are human RPE cells in a Petri dish exposed to various stressors. The ones bathed in blueberry anthocyanins had fewer free radicals, a lower proportion of aged cells, suggesting that blueberries and these other red-blue-purple pigmented fruits and vegetables may help prevent age-related macular degeneration. And blueberries may be especially important for blue eyes, as we saw in an earlier video. Preventing is nice, but what if we already have a disease like glaucoma, an incurable eye disease in which our optic nerve, of which connects our eyes to our brain, starts deteriorating, and we start losing our visual fields. A few years ago, Japanese researchers showed that they could apparently halt the progression of disease with black currents. They gave people black currents for six months, significantly boosting the blood flow to their optic nerve. The results suggested that black currents might be a safe and valuable option, but it was not double-blind, no control group. So I didn't report it when it was initially published, but here we go. Finally, glaucoma patients split into two groups, half got black currents, the other half didn't. Let's see what happened. Here's a measure of the deterioration of their visual fields in both groups, in the two years leading up to the beginning of the study. Worse, worse, worse. Despite taking the best glaucoma drugs on the market. Then the study starts. The berry-free control group continued to worsen. But the berries appeared to stop the disease in its tracks. One year later, two years later. And since there's no downside, only good side effects to berries, in my professional opinion, everyone with glaucoma should be eating berries every day.