Nutrition News

LAS VEGAS – A panel of experts here at Vision Expo West stressed the importance of becoming involved in nutritional supplements, whether prescribing them, selling them in-office or referring patients to online vendors.

A recently released report has shown that the use of specific dietary supplements in populations with chronic disease has the potential to save billions of dollars by reducing the number of disease-associated medical events, according to a press release from the Council for Responsible Nutrition.

There is still time to register for the fall educational symposium sponsored by the Ocular Nutrition Society. The meeting will be held Oct. 22 in the Washington State Convention Center in downtown Seattle, just 1 day prior to the American Academy of Optometry annual meeting.

Postmenopausal patients with moderate-to-severe keratoconjunctivitis sicca may benefit from supplements with gamma-linolenic acid and omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids for treatment of tear dysfunction, according to a study.

A recent study caught my eye the other day. While I grew up like everyone else – sucking down any carbonated soda that was within reach – once I started looking to see what was contained in that drink, I had to reconsider. We’ve already heard that the popular sodas contain high levels of a chemical that's used to give cola its caramel coloring (4-methylimidazole) and that the chemical could raise a soda-drinkers' cancer risk, according to the Center for Science in the Public Interest. Soda has also already been blamed for making kids obese. New research blames the sugary drinks for behavioral problems in children, too.

When the visual acuity of a child with amblyopia appears to plateau with spectacles and patching therapy prescribed at 2 hours per day, increasing the prescribed patching to 6 hours per day may resume improvement, according to recently released study results from the Pediatric Eye Disease Investigator Group.

TORONTO — Genotype-directed nutritional therapy could double the reduction in rate of progression to advanced age-related macular degeneration compared with therapy with the AREDS formulation, a speaker said here.

Bausch + Lomb has begun shipping its new PreserVision AREDS 2 Formula vitamin and mineral supplement, according to a news release.

No one disputes this fact: It takes tons of herbicides – hundreds of thousands of tons per year – to grow the genetically modified organism crops that end up in the world’s food supply, including in the food fed to the animals we eat. And all that poison doesn’t just go away. It ends up on our food, in our soil, in our water.

The number one-selling individual nutritional supplement is now omega-3. While it is beyond the scope of a blog to review the entire metabolic process of how omega-3s work in the body (join the Ocular Nutrition Society and listen to my lecture on it), let me just say it is effective and necessary for systemic and eye health.