Bright eyes
Keeping our eyes in perfect working order means paying attention to diet and choosing to eat the right foods
What we eat affects every part of our body. Our eyes in particular suffer from a lot of everyday stress and strain - lack of sleep, hours of close-up work at a computer terminal, reading, and even watching TV.
What can we eat to keep our eyes in top condition?
Vitamin A is a fat-soluble vitamin and one of its functions in the body is to promote good vision, especially in dim light.
The chemical name for vitamin A is retinol because it makes the pigments in the retina of the eye. There are two forms of vitamin A in food: retinol and carotenoids.
Retinol can be found in foods that come from animals such as dairy products like milk, cheese and butter, liver and oily fish such as sardines, mackerel, tuna and salmon. The richest sources are fish liver oils such as those from cod, halibut and shark.
Carotenoids are precursors of retinol, which means that retinol can be produced in the body using carotenoids from foods we eat. Fruits and vegetables are the most common source of carotenoids, the richest include carrots, dark green leafy vegetables, tomatoes, papaya, oranges, spinach and yellow squash.
The daily requirement for vitamin A for 11-18 year olds is 60ug (micrograms) per day, boys from 15 upwards need a little bit more. So for younger teens to meet their daily amount of vitamin A, they need to include a ? pint of semi-skimmed milk and a serving of spinach in their diet. An older teen boy will need to eat a tomato in addition to fulfil his requirement.
Zinc is essential: This mineral is required to produce an enzyme that helps vitamin A work in the eye.
Great food sources for zinc include pumpkin seeds, pecan nuts, oysters, red meat, wholewheat and rye flour.
The daily recommended amount of zinc is 9mg (milligrams) for 11-14-year-old boys and girls and 9.5mg and 7mg for 15-18-yr-old boys and girls respectively. One oyster provides 7mg of zinc.
Boys and younger girls can meet their extra requirements by eating either a serving of chicken, a handful of pecan nuts, a portion of Cheddar cheese, two slices of brown bread, a lamb chop, a serving of liver pate or a boiled egg.
Carrot power
Do you really need to eat carrots to be able to see in the dark?
Carrots contain beta-carotene, a substance that can be converted to retinol in the body.
Vitamin A is needed for healthy vision in dim light, if you don't eat enough vitamin A, you can develop night blindness.
So you really do need to eat carrots to make sure that you meet your daily requirement for vitamin A but other foods also contain beta-carotene such as liver, mango, milk, cheese, dark green leafy vegetables and eggs.
