Prevent & Treat Age-Related Macular Degeneration (AMD) with an Ancestral Diet
 

http://davidgillespie.org/stop-it-or-youll-go-blind/

I was told there is a connection between diabetes & macular degeneration. Another reason to not screw up my diet.

That makes sense. All the diseases of civilization seem to cluster together.

Very interesting. i have macular degeneration. My doctors have always pointed at sun damage, and I have always had to be careful to wear sunglasses, and I've taken the Macuvite combo meds which my doc carefully says have no proof, but they worked for people with higher challenges -- makes sense given my history thatthis would be relatted to diet and metabolic syndrome. Sigh. really quite extraordinary. :rheart:

I just did a quick search for the cause. I can summarize the bulk of info about that like this: "don't know".

From the point of view of evolution, macular degeneration (and basically all visual disorders of any kind, i.e. blindness, myopia, cataracts, etc) is extremely detrimental to survival. Therefore it's absolutely not a genetic disorder. It must be environmental, most likely diet, most likely carbs.

Personally, I met a guy in his 20's who suffered from severe macular degeneration. He used a special machine just to read. Therefore it must also be epigenetic (generational epigenetic). What this all means is that it's very hard to figure out the cause because we'd have to check what the parents did, and their parents, and so forth for at least 4 generations.

I note however that oxidative stress is involved, therefore ketones are involved because they are potent antioxidants which would otherwise take care of ROS. So, Imma say a very likely culprit is absence of ketones, therefore a high-carb diet.

Chris Knobbe pretty much says it's about nutrient density, i.e. displacing foods of modern commerce (taken from Weston Price's work). So the idea is that as we eat more flour, sugar and veggie oil for example, we eat less stuff that normally contains tons and tons of essential stuff like fat-solubles for example. And as we do this, degenerative diseases begin to appear. Chris talks about AMD, so the hypothesis includes AMD as one of those degenerative diseases. So, the obvious therapy here is to cut out all the crap and eat genuine food instead (but then that's the title of the video, doh).

I'm going to agree with Chris on that. However, as far as I'm aware, there's only a couple modern diets that have been tested experimentally in large groups of humans for long enough to draw solid conclusions about anything, and whatever ancestral diet he's talking about ain't one of them. But of those that have been tested, Atkins is king, it should do the job just fine because it too cuts out all the crap and includes genuine food instead.

Here's a related thread from 2016:

http://forum.lowcarber.org/showthread.php?t=474916

Similar information.

I always had great eyesight - 20/20 and better - until my mid forties, when reading kept requiring stronger and stronger magnification, just like every other member of my family. My eye doctor has been taling about macular degeneration for the last several years - it was getting worse, we will need to do something soon, etc. My prescription for glasses was changing every couple of years. I started LC 5 years ago, and over these years I am still getting "we will need to do something", but my prescription hasn't changed. So I accept what I am told as "doctor speak", and am of the opinion that things have calmed down, and evened out. Yes, i'm getting older, and things are running down, but I am pleased to think that the process is slower since changing my diet. Coincidence possibly, but I'm OK with that.

Thanks! It's the same talk but the slides are edited in differently. Nothing came up when I searched for it.

Your story reminds me of mine in a way. I had myopia for most of my life until I went low-carb. Once I did, my vision improved so much I could see a golf ball 300+ yards away (not bragging but that's how far I could hit it at times, I was the ball spotter for my foursome most times), and could read street signs two blocks away. I was amazed how far I could see clearly, when I remembered I could barely read a street sign half a block away before. But then I got sick and everything went south, including my eyesight. Now it's rather poor and fluctuates too.

On the one hand I'm quite certain diet was the primary cause for my poor vision before, and on the other hand I'm equally certain there's other things besides a crap diet that can have the same effect.