 Glaucoma is the second leading cause of legal blindness in white women, but the number one cause of blindness in African American women. That's one reason researchers chose a population of African American women to study the effects of fruit and vegetable consumption on glaucoma risk. But the other reason is because they were specifically interested in foods with the highest concentration of those high-protecting phytonutrients like zeaxanthin, kale, and collard greens. But you'd be lucky if you could find one in ten white people eating even a single serving a month, whereas that was a no-brainer for African Americans. What'd they find? Well, as I've stressed over the years, all fruits and vegetables are not the same. Whether you ever ate bananas or had one or more bananas every day didn't seem to matter much, but eating a couple of oranges every week was associated with dramatically lower risk. Not orange juice, though. You can drink orange juice every day, and it didn't seem to matter. A similar finding with peaches, fresh peaches seemed to work, but canned peaches didn't. Similarly, vegetables in general, as a catch-all term, didn't seem to matter. For example, whether you ate a green salad twice a week, once a week, or zero times a week, didn't seem to matter when it came to reducing glaucoma risk. But you know how pitiful most people's salads are. Here's the kale and collard greens. Check it out. Just two or three servings a month was associated with half the risk of glaucoma, compared to once a month or less. White people take note, as you may need it even more. The lighter our eye color, the more greens we need to eat. Blue eyes let 100 times more light through, so people with blue or gray eyes appear significantly more vulnerable to damage compared to brown or black, with green and hazel somewhere in the middle. It's interesting, carrots appear to be less protective in black women compared to white women. They suggest it could be differences in food preparation methods. Perhaps the African-American subjects tend to eat carrots raw, limiting the absorption of certain nutrients, while they chopped and prepared their collard greens with oil, making the nutrients more bioavailable, as the absorption of carotenoid phytonutrients depends on the presence of fat, which is why I encourage people to eat nuts or seeds with their greens, a little tahini sauce or something. Why not just take a zeaxanthin pill? Well, we don't know what exactly it is in these wonderful foods that's working their wonders, so it may be better to just recommend folks eat them rather than supplements. And in fact, people that take calcium or iron supplements may be doubling, quadrupling, or even septupling their odds of glaucoma. Better to just get most of our nutrients from produce, not pills.