The No.1 Eye Doctor: They’re Lying To You About Blue Light! The Truth About Floaters! Turn This Phone Setting On To Save Your Eyes!

0:00:02 There’s a lot of misconceptions around how we get bags under our eyes.
0:00:05 I always assume it’s that stress and they haven’t been sleeping.
0:00:08 So I did research to look into this and a lot of people don’t know this, but it’s actually…
0:00:10 Really?
0:00:15 So if I never want to get bags under my eyes again, what is the natural easy solution?
0:00:16 Try this.
0:00:19 Dr. Joseph Allen is the board certified eye doctor.
0:00:22 Helping millions of people understand eye health and unlocking the secrets behind
0:00:24 achieving sharper and healthier vision.
0:00:28 I really want to talk to you about so many misconceptions because I don’t know what’s true.
0:00:29 Sure.
0:00:31 Okay, so my vision loss being inevitable.
0:00:32 Is that true?
0:00:37 Unfortunately, there are changes that occur with age that will change your eyesight and vision.
0:00:41 But there’s a lot of things that can help prevent and slow down progression and we’ll go into them.
0:00:43 And then every once in a while, my eyelid starts twitching.
0:00:44 What is that?
0:00:45 Eyelid myokymia.
0:00:48 So that is your threshold of your stress.
0:00:50 Get more sleep and stop drinking so much caffeine.
0:00:51 What about blue light?
0:00:52 Is that harmful?
0:00:55 The blue light that comes from your digital screens has consistently shown in research
0:00:58 to not increase the risk of aging eye diseases.
0:01:02 And research on using blue light glasses shows that it could just be placebo effect.
0:01:04 But if you’re worried about how blue light is affecting you,
0:01:08 just moving your phone back twice as far will decrease your blue light exposure by 75%.
0:01:11 And more people are starting to care about that eye health than ever before.
0:01:14 But is our eye health getting better or worse?
0:01:14 Of course.
0:01:18 For example, right now about 30% of the world’s population is nearsighted.
0:01:23 But by about 2050, we will have about 50% of being nearsighted because of our lifestyle.
0:01:27 So how much screen time being indoors, reading books up close is okay?
0:01:28 It depends on age.
0:01:36 Who are you?
0:01:38 What do you do?
0:01:42 And I think most importantly of all, why is it so important that you do it?
0:01:44 I am a doctor of optometry.
0:01:48 I am a fellow of the American Academy of Optometry.
0:01:51 And I am a diplomat of the American Board of Optometry.
0:01:56 So I practice eye care here in the US.
0:02:02 And I see patients for all sorts of eye conditions, whether that be diagnosing,
0:02:07 managing anything from vision problems, simply as like nearsightedness or astigmatism,
0:02:13 to fitting contact lenses, to diagnosing different diseases in the back of the eye,
0:02:17 and then prescribing medications or therapy to try and prevent that from getting worse
0:02:18 or to help treat it.
0:02:26 On top of all of this, I also host on various social media channels
0:02:32 a educational website about helping people learn about the eyes, their vision,
0:02:34 and finding the best vision products.
0:02:41 And that really falls back to my mission of just helping people see their very best today,
0:02:44 but also keeping them see their best tomorrow.
0:02:50 And when you think about where we are as humans, as it relates to our eye health,
0:02:53 like what’s the macro picture, like what’s going on?
0:02:57 I don’t know whether it’s just because I’m getting older, but I’m wondering if more people
0:03:00 are starting to care about their eye health than ever before, and if they are, why?
0:03:03 And is our eye health getting better or worse?
0:03:12 I want to say that I think people generally are being more interested in eyes and vision.
0:03:16 Unfortunately, part of that is probably because they’re noticing more problems.
0:03:24 People are starting to notice dysfunctions or more problems with their eye strain.
0:03:25 They’re noticing more problems with dry eye.
0:03:33 Children are starting to become nearsighted, faster, and to greater degrees.
0:03:42 And because of those factors, we’re also seeing a lot more eye health conditions
0:03:47 in the back of the eye that also is reflected with other metabolic diseases like diabetes.
0:03:53 Significantly causes damage and leads to potential blindness inside the eye,
0:03:56 so there’s a lot of factors to it.
0:03:57 What’s changing?
0:04:03 You referred to some of the situations there as becoming more or worse, etc.
0:04:06 That would suggest that there’s something environmental or within our lifestyle that’s
0:04:08 having an impact on that.
0:04:11 So again, there’s many factors that go into it.
0:04:15 Certainly, just having an aging population, our population,
0:04:19 a lot of people are starting to move into older age groups.
0:04:26 We also have aftermath of poor diet, a lot of people with diabetes, high blood pressure,
0:04:30 and all these other conditions that cause ripple effects down the road.
0:04:36 And then our society has changed, especially in the form of lifestyle beyond diet.
0:04:42 Also, what we do throughout the day, how much time do we spend on devices up close?
0:04:46 How much of our society is focused on education?
0:04:49 And how much time do we spend indoors?
0:04:58 All of these things are pushing us as a society to have different changes within the eye
0:05:02 and increase our risk for diseases and potential vision loss.
0:05:04 Why does it matter?
0:05:09 You know, I ask that question because I think for people to spend time listening to all the
0:05:14 education you give out, they first have to really believe that their eyes matter.
0:05:18 And I know this sounds like a bit of a crazy question because we all can understand that
0:05:20 seeing things is useful.
0:05:23 But sometimes in life, I think we don’t appreciate things until we lose them.
0:05:26 And I think in your line of work, you must see that more than ever, no pun intended.
0:05:29 Right. No, you’re absolutely correct.
0:05:35 And it’s so frustrating as an eye care provider of how many patients or how many people just come
0:05:38 in because they finally notice something’s wrong.
0:05:42 And usually by the time something’s wrong, they notice it.
0:05:43 It’s already too late.
0:05:49 And so one of the best things I can recommend for anybody is to, whether you think you have
0:05:51 a problem with your vision, because a lot of people are like, “I see great.
0:05:51 I see fine.
0:05:52 I don’t need to see an eye doctor.”
0:05:54 It’s like, “No, you absolutely need to.”
0:05:58 There are so many different, not only just problems with your eyesight that we can catch,
0:06:05 but there’s so many, there’s over 270 different conditions, systemic and vision conditions that
0:06:13 an eye doctor can diagnose from just one of the simplest non-invasive medical evaluations.
0:06:15 And that’s just getting an eye exam every year.
0:06:19 Give me some examples of how conditions you’ve spotted by doing an eye exam.
0:06:24 So patients who don’t know they’re diabetic will catch diabetes by looking inside the eye
0:06:26 because diabetes will cause damage to the blood vessels.
0:06:29 And we can see bleeding happening in the retinal tissue.
0:06:34 We can see high blood pressure, high cholesterol.
0:06:38 I’ve had patients where I’ve caught that they’ve technically had little strokes already
0:06:40 inside because it’s looking inside the eye.
0:06:42 The eye itself can have a stroke.
0:06:45 We can see cholesterol plaques stuck in the arteries within the eye.
0:06:48 Autoimmune conditions.
0:06:50 We’ll catch those from doing an eye exam.
0:06:58 Unfortunately, things like brain tumors and conditions like multiple sclerosis will catch those.
0:07:02 I’ve, I had a one story I’ll share.
0:07:06 I have one patient who was, she was young.
0:07:09 She was 20 years old, college student.
0:07:11 She came in for just getting new glasses contact lenses.
0:07:12 She has to go to school.
0:07:13 She has to see well.
0:07:17 And during that very routine exam, she has no other problems.
0:07:21 I’m looking inside the eye and I can see a hemorrhage,
0:07:22 a blood spot.
0:07:26 But there’s different types of hemorrhaging that occurs in the back of the eye.
0:07:30 This specific type of hemorrhage is called a Roth spot.
0:07:39 And typically we only see Roth spots if somebody has a more serious condition going on.
0:07:41 Can you show me on that where you saw it?
0:07:42 Sorry.
0:07:42 So.
0:07:48 So we, for people that aren’t watching and just listening on audio, we have a model of an eye here.
0:07:53 So with the model of the eyeball, during the exam, we of course look through the cornea,
0:07:54 through the pupil.
0:07:55 Usually we dilate the pupils.
0:08:02 If I was to open up the inside of the eye, the orange part that you see here, that’s the retinal
0:08:03 tissue.
0:08:06 And you can see the little red lines, those are blood vessels.
0:08:11 The retina is really, the eyeball is kind of beautiful because it has a dual blood supply.
0:08:15 So it actually has blood that comes through the back and supplies the retina from the back side.
0:08:20 But then it has blood vessels that go within the retina and supply nutrients within the retina
0:08:20 from the front side.
0:08:26 So this type of bleeding spot was occurring just right here in the back of the eye,
0:08:28 a little bit off angle, but it was occurring there.
0:08:32 And I was like, this should not be there.
0:08:36 Especially for somebody that was healthy, had no other issues.
0:08:37 What sort of age?
0:08:40 She was 20 year old female college student.
0:08:45 And usually again, we see raw spots in more serious conditions,
0:08:53 whether somebody is extremely diabetic or they have HIV, something is going on.
0:08:55 So I said, this is not right.
0:08:56 We need to do blood work.
0:09:03 So I ended up referring her, basically did requested blood, blood, blood panel.
0:09:05 And she didn’t have like a family doctor.
0:09:08 So I’m like, okay, we need to refer you, but she’s heading out to college.
0:09:09 So I’m like, I’m going to give you my full report.
0:09:11 I need you to go get this done.
0:09:13 And then COVID happened.
0:09:15 So I didn’t hear anything.
0:09:21 And so finally a few weeks later, they finally allowed doctors to go back into
0:09:23 clinics for emergency care in case I had an emergency.
0:09:25 And I called up that patient.
0:09:27 I just wanted to check on her, see, hey, what’s going on?
0:09:28 Did you have to get that blood work?
0:09:29 And she’s like, you saved my life.
0:09:32 And I was like, what?
0:09:33 She’s like, yeah.
0:09:37 A few days later, I started feeling really tired and not feeling well.
0:09:40 So I went into the doctor and I brought your report.
0:09:41 They did blood work.
0:09:46 They found out I had, they put her in intensive care unit for three days
0:09:49 because they were worried she was going to bleed out.
0:09:56 Her platelets were so low that she could have just bled there from doing the blood work.
0:10:01 She had an immunothrombocytopenic perpura.
0:10:07 So her immune system, because probably a virus, but her immune system was attacking
0:10:08 her platelets.
0:10:11 Platelets are the thing that sort of clots the blood, right?
0:10:11 Correct.
0:10:15 And that ended up manifesting in the eye.
0:10:19 So it was one of the few cases where I was like, wow.
0:10:23 Like, otherwise if she hadn’t come in, what could have happened?
0:10:24 Right?
0:10:29 So I just use that as a good demonstration because there are so many things that we catch on
0:10:31 even a daily, weekly basis.
0:10:34 There’s so many misconceptions around vision in the eye.
0:10:39 I think one of the misconceptions I think I found myself living under is that my vision
0:10:43 loss is inevitable, really irrespective of what I do.
0:10:48 And the minute you start to believe that story, then it kind of disempowers you,
0:10:51 but it takes all your motivation to do anything about your vision.
0:10:52 Now is that true?
0:10:59 There is changes that occur with age that will change your eyesight and vision.
0:11:07 That some just fundamental facts that you don’t really have like supreme control over.
0:11:08 It’s like your hair growing gray.
0:11:10 Like it’s going to happen.
0:11:11 It’s kind of accepted.
0:11:12 Yeah, with older age, you’re going to have gray hair.
0:11:19 With the eye, there’s conditions like that, like cataracts, age-related cataracts,
0:11:20 eventually will develop.
0:11:26 Pressbiopia, that’s the condition where people are in their 40s and early 50s.
0:11:30 They start having a hard time seeing up close and they have to push things further back and
0:11:33 they start wearing bifocals or varifocals.
0:11:37 So those sort of conditions inevitably do happen.
0:11:45 But there are thankfully a lot of things in our lifestyle that research is paying more attention
0:11:53 to that can help prevent, hopefully prevent and even slow down the progression of more
0:11:55 devastating blinding eye diseases.
0:12:01 So there are things you can do and be aware of and happy to go into that.
0:12:09 So global eye health and the statistics, one of the really sort of shocking stats I read is that
0:12:14 most of us are going to develop neocytidness when you go into sort of 2050, 2016.
0:12:15 Is that true?
0:12:16 What are the stats around that?
0:12:21 So a publication came out in 2016, an ophthalmology author of Holden.
0:12:26 They looked at the statistics of myopia or neocytidness.
0:12:32 Even going further back, we’ve known that neocytidness does, is progressing.
0:12:41 And now between around 20, it’s estimated that right now about 30% of the world’s population
0:12:42 is neocytid.
0:12:48 But by about 2050, we will have about 50% of the entire world’s population being neocytid.
0:12:56 In the US right now, for kids aged 5 to 19, it were already about 42%.
0:13:05 And by 2030, so in just a few years, it’s expected the US will be about that 50% mark.
0:13:11 And then other parts of the world, like East Asia, like in Japan, it’s closer to 80% and 90%
0:13:14 people are already neocytid.
0:13:14 Really?
0:13:16 How come?
0:13:21 There’s certainly genetics plays a role.
0:13:25 As more research has come out, we know that genetics maybe only plays maybe up to about
0:13:27 30% of the factor.
0:13:32 So if your parents are neocytid, or if somebody’s severely neocytid, like if your mom’s severely
0:13:36 neocytid, you are a much higher risk of developing it.
0:13:43 But the key other factors of lifestyle falls down to urbanization.
0:13:51 Really the fact that if you go outside in a big city that has streets really close to each other,
0:13:53 you’re not really in an open field, right?
0:13:55 You have big, tall buildings right next to you.
0:14:00 And then you go inside and you’re inside of a smaller building, a smaller apartment.
0:14:07 Then there’s the fact that we spend so much emphasis in our society on education,
0:14:10 on being up close beings, right?
0:14:15 Kids now are not only pushed to excel in education and being introduced to education
0:14:18 earlier and to spend more time studying and learning.
0:14:25 But parents are giving their kids digital devices as the babysitter 2.0, right?
0:14:28 So kids are staring at tablets even from a very young age.
0:14:32 And then it’s the amount of time we’re spending indoors.
0:14:38 It’s interesting because I don’t even think most people realize that
0:14:45 the way we live our lives, the things we stare at being indoors can change the eye.
0:14:48 I think we all kind of operate under this assumption that our eyes are just our eyes.
0:14:52 And we think of muscles as being trainable and exerciseable.
0:14:55 I can go to the gym, I lift a weight, my muscle changes.
0:14:57 But my eye changing is something that I think is quite a
0:15:01 and surprising concept to most people.
0:15:04 How do we know this?
0:15:12 So statistically, we’ve watched and data collected for many decades,
0:15:15 watching people gradually become more and more nearsighted.
0:15:19 And there’s been in those theories of why that could happen.
0:15:25 The evidence of what changes physiologically with the eyeball
0:15:31 is that the eye, as you grow and go through adolescence and your body’s growing,
0:15:40 the eyeball actually grows backward toward the brain into the orbit eye socket a little bit.
0:15:42 And it doesn’t need to change much.
0:15:47 The eye growing one millimeter, just one millimeter,
0:15:51 will change your prescription for glasses by about three diopters,
0:15:54 which is a high amount.
0:15:56 So if somebody gets two millimeters of change,
0:16:02 that is already into what we classify as severe myopia,
0:16:08 which carries a high risk for eye diseases like glaucoma, cataracts,
0:16:13 having a retinal detachment where the retina in the back of the eye peels off the back of the globe.
0:16:16 And then what’s called myopic maculopathy,
0:16:21 which is a form of kind of macular degeneration that typically occurs with later age.
0:16:27 And that one millimeter, two millimeter growth is linked to lifestyle.
0:16:29 The vast majority of it.
0:16:35 How much screen time, how much being indoors,
0:16:38 how much reading books up close is okay?
0:16:41 Is there like a recommended daily allowance?
0:16:48 So there are some recommendations put forth by the American Academy of Pediatrics.
0:16:53 And it depends a little bit on age, especially for young kids.
0:16:58 But I think for the first few years of life, they don’t recommend kids look at screens at all.
0:17:00 And then why?
0:17:05 Why? Because again, there’s research showing that not just for eye development,
0:17:07 but also neurological development.
0:17:13 And I’m not a specialist on that form of pediatric brain development,
0:17:15 so I can’t really opine on that.
0:17:18 But we do, there are recommendations for it.
0:17:20 And I encourage anybody who’s listening,
0:17:22 if you have a young child, if you’re thinking about having a child,
0:17:24 definitely look into those recommendations,
0:17:27 because it has impacts on your child’s development and growth.
0:17:32 The, as far as like adults, like you and I are both in our 30s,
0:17:36 how much time is spending on like looking up close.
0:17:40 Once you’re past the age of like 20, 25,
0:17:44 the rate of myopia development thankfully slows down.
0:17:44 That’s in the sightedness.
0:17:46 Near sightedness, correct.
0:17:47 That does slow down.
0:17:54 But about 10% of the population can still develop a stronger and stronger prescription.
0:17:57 And part of that, again, is your education
0:18:00 and how much time you’re spending indoors and on your devices.
0:18:06 The, there have been numerous studies looking at outdoor time,
0:18:12 and that spending more time outside can offset the onset
0:18:14 and progression of near sightedness.
0:18:21 Most studies are quoting somewhere around 90 minutes to two hours a day,
0:18:26 can kind of offset the, all the near work that children are using.
0:18:28 So spending sort of 90 minutes to two hours a day,
0:18:31 looking outside, looking far.
0:18:33 That’s, that’s a part of it.
0:18:36 The various studies do look at, you know,
0:18:38 are they doing things up close while they’re outside?
0:18:40 Or is it just being outside?
0:18:42 It’s not fully understood.
0:18:44 Is it sunlight?
0:18:46 Is it the brightness of light outside?
0:18:52 Is it the individual, specific wavelengths of sunlight
0:18:55 that are somehow communicating to the back of the eye to grow or not?
0:19:02 There’s also the thought that the way the world around us
0:19:05 focuses on the retina when we’re outside
0:19:07 may send a different signal to the back of the eye.
0:19:12 Because one of the areas that they’ve done so much research
0:19:16 on in terms of how myopia progresses
0:19:20 has to do with how light is focusing on different parts of the retina.
0:19:25 I do want to just step back when it comes to all the spending time outside.
0:19:29 It’s, again, that research is largely based on surveys.
0:19:32 And so they aren’t 100% sure how much light
0:19:34 outs the door time people are really getting.
0:19:40 So now they’re utilizing health trackers and giving it to kids for those studies
0:19:42 so they can track truly how much light they’re getting
0:19:45 when they’re stepping outside, which is not.
0:19:47 So they can have a better objective data
0:19:50 to really understand the risk of myopia progression based on that.
0:19:54 I was wondering if Vitamin D plays a role at all there.
0:19:56 That’s also theorized and looked at in some studies.
0:20:05 Also just athletics and getting more motion in the daily activities.
0:20:09 So there’s many different studies in those regards.
0:20:11 But right now, even a study out of Taiwan,
0:20:15 they’ve been implementing a policy.
0:20:18 It’s like, hey, you have to get at least 90 to two hours,
0:20:21 90 minutes to two hours outside every single day.
0:20:24 And they have noticed over the last decade,
0:20:27 there has been a decrease in childhood myopia
0:20:32 development. There’s still some debate if it helps slow down progression.
0:20:35 Because even a more recent meta-analysis said
0:20:38 it wasn’t statistically significant for the progression of myopia,
0:20:41 but it does delay onset of myopia.
0:20:43 Can you reverse myopia?
0:20:44 No.
0:20:51 Okay, so if I become nearsighted because of my lifestyle or some other reason,
0:20:54 I can’t then just spend loads of time outside
0:20:57 and reverse it and start gazing off into the distance, etc.
0:21:02 So there’s the understanding of what true myopia is.
0:21:04 And again, that has to do with the elongation of the eyeball.
0:21:10 So if you were to somehow find a way to truly reverse myopia,
0:21:13 you would have to find a way to somehow shift that part of the eye forward,
0:21:16 which we have not been able to do.
0:21:20 There are, I know just being in the world of social media,
0:21:23 there are people who will claim that they’ve done this
0:21:26 using various things.
0:21:30 Usually these people who are claiming this are selling something that is not based on science.
0:21:35 That is, and doing a research study to prove that would be very easy to do.
0:21:38 And it just, it hasn’t, it doesn’t show.
0:21:42 Most people, if they are doing, spending more time outside,
0:21:47 or they are doing eye exercises of any form to try and reverse their nearsightedness,
0:21:53 what’s likely what they’re going through is that they have something called pseudo myopia.
0:22:00 Which is where they’ve overused their eye muscles so much
0:22:02 that they’re more or less having a spasm.
0:22:08 And they’ve, their muscle is making them think that they are nearsightedness.
0:22:12 But then finally, going outside, spending more time outside,
0:22:15 stop staring at their phone so much, they learn to relax their eye muscles.
0:22:19 And all of a sudden, now they can see better again.
0:22:22 Well, this is, you know, in part one of my, my personal concerns,
0:22:26 because sometimes, very rare occasions, I’ll spend, you know,
0:22:29 maybe nine, 10, 12 hours in this studio.
0:22:32 And, you know, I’m doing research on the guest before the guest arrives,
0:22:36 and then we’re sitting at this sort of distance, and I’m very intently focused.
0:22:38 And it’s a dark room, et cetera.
0:22:42 And then when I walk outside, it’s like, I can’t see a bloody number plate.
0:22:43 And I think I’m losing my vision.
0:22:47 But from what you’re saying there, it sounds like I’m going through a bit of pseudo myopia.
0:22:51 You could be. You’re, of course, I haven’t done an eye exam on you.
0:22:52 I don’t know where you’re at.
0:22:54 Can I ask, when was the last time you had your eye check?
0:22:54 Oh, no comment.
0:22:57 It was a long time ago.
0:23:01 And the reason for that is, again, because I just, I always assume eyes were fine.
0:23:05 So it would have been, gosh, that’s such a good question.
0:23:08 Maybe seven years ago or something.
0:23:12 So it’s tough to say, you know, there is possibility
0:23:15 that maybe there’s a little bit of nearsightedness there.
0:23:20 It could be that you’ve used your eye muscles so much indoors
0:23:21 that you’re just, you’re used to lifting it.
0:23:24 Think of it like lifting a five pound weight, right?
0:23:28 You’ve held it there all day long and most people can.
0:23:30 Eventually if you hold it there long enough, you can have some eye strain
0:23:32 and people will feel that at the end of the day.
0:23:37 But then you step outside and you’re just used to holding it five pound weight at arms level.
0:23:40 So you have to learn to, hey, I can relax this and put it back down.
0:23:46 So that is a component of the internal eye muscle called the ciliary body,
0:23:52 which unfortunately is not the same type of muscle as your skeletal muscle.
0:23:58 And so even with eye exercises, you can’t strengthen that muscle.
0:24:00 So eye exercises don’t work?
0:24:07 The eye exercises in the form of what’s called vision therapy or orthoptics can work,
0:24:09 but they’re not building the muscle.
0:24:15 They are improving the, really the coordination of your brain,
0:24:19 communicating that information to those muscles to work in coordination.
0:24:26 And so there’s some certain binocular vision disorders,
0:24:28 like people who have convergence and sufficiency,
0:24:33 they can’t move their eyes to bring them forward to keep a page in front of them single.
0:24:37 Or some people have loss of their accommodative ability,
0:24:40 their ability to change focus to keep something up close, clear.
0:24:47 Those type of binocular vision issues can be trained, again,
0:24:51 through the training of the communication between the brain and those muscles.
0:24:56 Should I be looking for clues as to what the future of my vision is going to be like from my parents?
0:25:00 Because my parents are, they hold everything at like one meter length from their face.
0:25:03 And I, when I was younger, used to take the piss out of them thinking like,
0:25:07 that’s so ridiculous. And I would show them that I could read from like one centimeter away.
0:25:09 And they’re reading at arm’s length,
0:25:14 but I think they’re going to have the last laugh when I get to 50, 60 years old.
0:25:14 Sure.
0:25:16 Because of genetics or whatever.
0:25:21 So again, even without genetics, just the way the eye ages,
0:25:24 the lens inside of your eye will change.
0:25:26 Which is.
0:25:28 So if I open up the eye model here,
0:25:32 let me try not to spill everything from the inside of the eye.
0:25:36 In the front portion of the eye, you have the cornea.
0:25:38 Which is the, is that the very front piece?
0:25:40 It’s the clear window to the eye.
0:25:40 Okay.
0:25:44 Behind it, of course, you have the iris, the colored part of the eye.
0:25:45 So brown eyes, blue eyes.
0:25:49 Behind that, you have a lens.
0:25:52 It’s called the crystalline lens.
0:25:55 And this has got a couple of different pieces, I’ll set those to the side.
0:25:59 But this crystalline lens is actually about the size of an M&M.
0:26:02 I put these together. It’s kind of that shape.
0:26:07 When you’re born, this lens is clear and thin.
0:26:12 And so the muscle inside the eye actually pulls on this lens to change its shape.
0:26:16 And that’s what helps you as a little kid see all the way toward the front of your nose.
0:26:21 As you get older, this lens gains an extra layer,
0:26:24 basically every year of your life.
0:26:28 And so as you get older, if you ever look up on images online,
0:26:31 you can actually see rings or these little lines.
0:26:33 And it’s like looking at the rings of a tree.
0:26:36 So you can basically count those and be like, look how old this person is.
0:26:41 So by the time everybody’s about in their early 40s,
0:26:47 there’s algorithms that predict this with high accuracy.
0:26:48 And in school, I had memorized them.
0:26:51 I don’t really need to use them as much anymore.
0:26:52 So I haven’t thought about it for a while.
0:27:00 But these, as this lens gets thicker, it basically gets thicker every year.
0:27:03 It gets to a point where the lens starts to,
0:27:06 the crystals within that lens start to change shape.
0:27:09 They become more crystallized, rigid.
0:27:13 And so even though the muscle inside the eye is still pulling on this lens,
0:27:15 it’s like pulling on a hard stiff marble.
0:27:18 It doesn’t want to change shape anymore.
0:27:21 And so that’s why people can gradually like,
0:27:23 I can’t quite keep things as clear anymore.
0:27:25 And so it’s gradually getting worse and worse.
0:27:34 Eventually, once you get closer to the ages of 50, 60, 70, 80,
0:27:39 this lens continues to get thicker, harder.
0:27:41 But then the crystals start to change color.
0:27:46 They go from being clear to being more of a faint yellow color
0:27:48 to a darker yellow whitish color.
0:27:51 And that’s what we call a cataract.
0:27:57 And so people lose vision because that cataract is so such a dense color
0:27:59 that light is not filtering.
0:28:02 It’s not passing through to getting to the retina in the back of the eye anymore.
0:28:03 So what did you do? Cut it out?
0:28:08 So there is, thankfully cataract surgery is an amazing surgery.
0:28:11 I think it’s probably one of the more fascinating surgeries that’s out there.
0:28:16 They, what modern cataract surgery does,
0:28:21 they either use a laser or they physically have to open up parts of the eye,
0:28:25 but they use a procedure called FACO emulsification.
0:28:30 It’s basically using ultrasound to shatter the lens into dust.
0:28:35 And then they have a small vacuum tube that sucks up all the particles out of the eye.
0:28:43 But then a new plastic lens is inserted into the eye, into that place.
0:28:48 And that new plastic lens can be made to account for any glasses prescription that you need.
0:28:49 Okay.
0:28:52 And what’s fascinating for you and I is that,
0:28:57 so this form of cataract surgery has been evolving and getting better and better over generations,
0:29:01 but the new lens implants that they’ve been engineering
0:29:04 are just outstanding, even right now.
0:29:07 Because now they can make multifocal lenses.
0:29:10 They can have lenses that change shape based on how you’re using your eyes.
0:29:18 And then it’s basically not needing bifocals, not needing glasses as much in some cases, if at all.
0:29:22 And so I keep on thinking like, wow, where this technology is right now?
0:29:26 Where is it going to be in 30, 40 years when you and I are getting to that point
0:29:27 where we might need to think about it?
0:29:30 Who knows what we’re going to have.
0:29:32 I reckon we’ll have like cameras.
0:29:33 I hope so.
0:29:36 Are people working on that kind of thing?
0:29:39 I bet someone’s working on some kind of camera, electric eyeball.
0:29:44 You know, I did hear of some research maybe about five, six years ago of somebody talking about it.
0:29:48 But since then, the things have kind of gone quiet.
0:29:54 They are probably in the last year, one of the last few years,
0:29:58 there’s been interest and research into making like augmented reality contact lenses
0:30:00 that are quite fascinating.
0:30:08 And then there is kind of one of the newest things is the first whole eye transplant.
0:30:12 That was one of the kind of the coolest things that have come up recently.
0:30:13 There was an eye transplant.
0:30:18 So a gentleman was injured in him.
0:30:22 He was a U.S. military, but something happened on the job.
0:30:25 Electrical damage to his face, his eye.
0:30:30 He ended up having partial face transplant and then a whole eye transplant.
0:30:34 And at this time, it is the first one ever done.
0:30:40 The eye is so unique and so complex that when they finally do this transplant,
0:30:43 it’s sort of shaken the eye care role a little bit.
0:30:51 I just read like a one year publication in JAMA that was basically summarizing what it’s
0:30:53 been like after this last year.
0:30:58 And it’s amazing because the eye did connect to the optic nerve,
0:31:00 because the eye again is so complex.
0:31:03 So they had to not only connect muscles to the eyeball,
0:31:08 but they had to connect the optic nerve from the donor tissue to the host.
0:31:14 And keeping that the right amount of blood supply, having it so it didn’t reject,
0:31:17 is a really tough feat.
0:31:21 And what they have now, they find that the last paper I just read,
0:31:24 that the eye is still doing well.
0:31:26 It’s still got blood flow.
0:31:30 It’s making aqueous humor, the kind of the clear blood within the eye.
0:31:36 And through functional MRIs and electro-retinograms that we can do in the clinic,
0:31:40 they have been able to show that there is electrical activity going to
0:31:41 the patient’s brain.
0:31:47 Unfortunately, he does not have any eyesight or he cannot detect light with it.
0:31:55 But I think just this is the first step of showing like, wow, we actually can try this.
0:31:58 We can get it so it actually is safe.
0:32:02 So it’s pretty fascinating.
0:32:04 God, it’s only going to be a matter of time, isn’t it?
0:32:06 You said there that the eye is complex.
0:32:09 I was reading some stats around the eye.
0:32:10 That blew my mind.
0:32:15 The eye contains over two million working parts and is considered the second most complex organ
0:32:15 in the body.
0:32:17 I guess the brain is the first.
0:32:20 And the eyeball is really an extension of the brain.
0:32:20 Right.
0:32:22 The retina in the back of the eye
0:32:28 communicates directly through the optic nerve to many parts of the brain.
0:32:32 Your eyes are capable of processing 36,000 pieces of information an hour.
0:32:36 Your eyes will process 24 million images throughout your lifetime contributing to 85%
0:32:38 of your total knowledge.
0:32:42 And there’s a comment saying that the eye is a window to your soul,
0:32:46 showing how the eyes are so expressive that they can reveal a lot of our persons in a state,
0:32:48 which we talked about a second ago.
0:32:53 That’s just crazy that that particular stat around 85% of my total knowledge will basically
0:32:54 come from my eye.
0:32:59 When you say it, I kind of understand it because I’m reading, I’m seeing, I’m learning
0:33:04 through my eyeballs, but it is cause for protecting our eyes.
0:33:08 And the things you’ve described there, cataracts and these other sort of eye conditions,
0:33:15 cataracts in particular, is that something that I can stave off by making better choices with my life?
0:33:24 So people who do smoke, people who drink more, that increases their oxidation.
0:33:31 So the cataract formation mostly occurs due to oxidative stress within the eye.
0:33:37 In fact, the most vitamin C in the body is within the eye and it bathes, it’s in a solution that
0:33:41 bathes around the lens and helps prevent it from oxidizing.
0:33:49 So best things is try not to smoke, drinking not to do too much.
0:33:54 The sunlight does play a role in aging of the lens.
0:34:00 And so there’s epidemiological studies on age-related eye diseases that have found that
0:34:04 people who spend more time outdoors without sunlight protection, without wide-brim hats,
0:34:08 without sunglasses, they are more likely to develop conditions like cataracts.
0:34:11 There is a specific, there’s different types of cataracts.
0:34:14 There’s one specific type of cataract called a cortical cataract.
0:34:16 To that, it kind of looks like bicycle spokes.
0:34:20 If you’re looking in the eye like I do in the exam room, you can see these bicycle spokes.
0:34:24 And those have been found to be more related to UV light exposure.
0:34:30 And then as far as taking supplements, vitamins, those sort of things,
0:34:34 because things like vitamin C are a water-soluble vitamin,
0:34:40 once you have enough vitamin C in your body, you just urinate out everything else.
0:34:44 So there have been studies on people who are malnourished and don’t get enough vitamin C,
0:34:48 that giving them vitamin C can help slow or delay the onset of cataracts.
0:34:56 But if you already are getting proper nutrition, taking additional vitamin Cs,
0:35:02 probably not going to delay your onset of cataracts specifically.
0:35:05 I learned something from you, actually, from your Instagram,
0:35:08 which I think is really going to do me a lot of favors,
0:35:10 because I’m someone that spends a lot of time on my phone in, literally.
0:35:15 And you alerted me to the fact that there’s actually a feature in the iPhone,
0:35:20 which will help me stave off my myopia potentially.
0:35:26 Perhaps. So thankfully, again, the eye care community is not the only
0:35:29 people who are aware of these issues with using devices up close.
0:35:33 But thankfully, whether it be Apple specifically with their iPhone,
0:35:37 but also the other phone manufacturers, people who are making these devices,
0:35:41 now have software that tracks, hey, you’re holding this really close to your face.
0:35:45 We want you to push it further back. So thankfully, they do have those sort of
0:35:49 notifications that people can turn on. I’ll admit that I turned mine on for a while,
0:35:53 and I eventually got so annoyed with it that I wanted to push it further back.
0:35:57 So I kept it on for a while. I eventually took it off.
0:36:03 But maybe I’ll have to put it back on again. Just serve a good example.
0:36:08 So it was a feature release in 2023, and it essentially sends you a notification
0:36:12 whenever your phone is, is it 12 inches or something?
0:36:18 I don’t remember exactly how close it is. But we do know that on average,
0:36:23 people hold their phones and devices around eight inches away from their face.
0:36:27 So pretty close. And it’s important to consider moving things further back.
0:36:34 And part of that can be because certainly eye strain relationships, possibly myopia,
0:36:38 and then even blue light, I know people are getting really concerned and
0:36:45 interested around the blue light world, especially since COVID that really blew up at that time.
0:36:50 But just moving your phone back twice as far will decrease your blue light exposure by
0:36:57 like a full 75%. So if you’re worried about how blue light is affecting you,
0:36:59 it’s like just move your phone back a few inches,
0:37:02 and that’s automatically going to decrease your blue light exposure from that device.
0:37:05 I don’t think most people know that this feature even exists because
0:37:08 I don’t think Apple really ever announced it or did a marketing campaign around it.
0:37:12 But in the setting section of your phone or your iPad, et cetera,
0:37:17 it’s under screen time. And under screen time, there’s a button called screen distance.
0:37:20 And it says to reduce eye strain and risk of myopia in children,
0:37:26 screen distance will alert you to hold an iPhone or iPad with Face ID at a recommended distance.
0:37:31 And in the small print, it says screen distance works by measuring the distance between the screen
0:37:36 and your eyes. The camera is not capturing images or your face, and the data collected
0:37:41 remains on the device. So if we click continue, it then says this is how screen distance works.
0:37:45 Screen distance encourages you to move your iPhone and iPad further away to support your
0:37:50 vision health. The next section says vision distance or viewing distance.
0:37:56 iPhone or iPad should be held at a suggested distance of 30 centimeters from your eyes.
0:38:00 Interesting.
0:38:04 Those are recommendations, but how many people actually follow that?
0:38:06 No one.
0:38:10 Yeah, it’s tough. I mean, you’ll see people do that and it just gradually over time gets closer
0:38:15 and closer. And kids probably are even worse because they automatically have smaller arms,
0:38:21 but then they just bring it right up close. They want that phone screen to take up all of their
0:38:25 visual field. And so it is, I think it’s a good habit. I think it’s something,
0:38:30 tell me, have you turned it on? Has it something that you’ve utilized?
0:38:34 I turned it on when I was in preparation for you coming here today. So I didn’t know it existed
0:38:38 until I was researching you. And so I’ve had it on for about a day. Frankly, I haven’t actually
0:38:43 got the notification yet, but it’s not been on long enough. I don’t think for me to have an opinion
0:38:47 on it just yet, but you said it was annoying you. So it’s definitely going to annoy me if it annoyed
0:38:55 you. So my challenge was that in the evenings, I work contacts most of the time and I take
0:39:02 my contact lenses out in the evening and I go back to glasses. And sometimes I’ll lay down and
0:39:07 I’ll take my glasses off because I’m so nearsighted. I want to see the screen, but I have to hold the
0:39:13 screen just a few centimeters in front of my face because I’m that nearsighted. And then it would
0:39:18 just give me that warning the whole time and it delays. It has like a few seconds of a delay
0:39:22 once I pull it back before it actually shows me the screen again. So I was doing it so much. I’m
0:39:29 like, I know that I should pull the screen away and I should just take a break, but it was delaying
0:39:35 my productivity. So that’s why. But again, this is a good example. I’ll probably turn it back on
0:39:39 and see how it goes. And if you have kids, you can always, you know, they’re not probably doing
0:39:43 much. That’s productive. You can always turn on their devices, I guess. Yeah, I think so. I think
0:39:49 it’s also a good habit to lead by example for kids and try to be aware of how much time you’re
0:39:54 spending on your phone in front of your kids because your kids are going to see that and
0:40:00 they’re going to probably mimic that same behavior. I want to talk to you about bags under my eyes.
0:40:05 It’s subject that I know a lot of people are interested in. And there’s a lot of misconceptions
0:40:09 around how we get bags under our eyes. I think most people think bags into their eyes are because
0:40:14 they’re tired or something. And is there a difference between having bags into my eyes and having sort
0:40:23 of dark circles under my eyes? So when it comes to having dark circles under eye bags, dark circles
0:40:28 is something that people are definitely concerned about. It’s a huge topic online. I see all the
0:40:34 time people ask about it in the eye clinic. Having dark circles under the eyes is technically
0:40:38 different than having under eye bags. But if you have under eye bags, it’ll make the appearance
0:40:44 of dark circles worse. So dark circles in the clinic, we think first what somebody’s skin
0:40:49 pigmentation like is the dark circle just because they have more pigmentation. And if you’re somebody
0:40:54 who spends a lot of time in the sunlight, you are more likely to develop darker skin complexion
0:40:58 around the eyelids. The eyelids are some of the thinnest, most delicate tissue of skin on your
0:41:06 body. And in fact, a lot of people who don’t know this, but under having skin cancer on your
0:41:13 lower eyelids actually pretty high. So it’s good to be wearing either a wide brim hat or sunglasses
0:41:21 to protect the eyes from sunlight damage. The other kind of components is that if you have
0:41:28 vascular changes, so myself I have a really pale complexion. If I have bad allergies, that can
0:41:33 cause the blood vessels around my eyelids to dilate. And so you’ll see that color of just the
0:41:39 blood vessels coming through the skin a lot easier. And then there’s orbital shadow effects.
0:41:43 Because some people’s orbits, they have more prominent brow, it may kind of cast a shadow
0:41:52 onto the lower eyelid. And that’s where having under eye bags can also make the eyelids seem like
0:41:59 have kind of a dark circles because the eyelids are puffy. And you can have puffiness of the
0:42:05 eyelids for multiple reasons. Allergies are a big one. Salt content of the tear film. And even in
0:42:12 your body can make some of those changes. I know for myself, if I have a cheat day and I eat a
0:42:19 bunch of greasy, delicious pizza, the next morning, I can feel that my skin in my face is maybe a
0:42:24 little bit more puffy. Thankfully, that goes away within a few hours. But that’s why a lot of times,
0:42:29 even just doing cold compresses, right? You see people put cucumbers on their eyes. A lot of
0:42:34 that is more has to do with just the cooling temperature. Doing a cold compress for 10 at
0:42:40 max 15 minutes can bring some of that puffiness down. And that can at least help improve the
0:42:45 appearance. So if I have a really salty diet the night before, there’s a greater probability I’ll
0:42:52 wake up with bags under my eyes? Possibly. Okay. I’ve tried to research this to find any real
0:42:59 publications to see if it’s really there. And I couldn’t find anything. But I know from just my
0:43:06 own anecdotal experience that if I eat a really high salt diet, and I’ve done over the last eight
0:43:10 years, I’ve really done a better job. I know you have too of like thinking about my diet, how that
0:43:15 affects me, how my body feels after I eat something. And so I’ve noticed if I have a cheat day, that
0:43:20 sort of thing can happen. And where does this, what’s the sort of physiological rationale for salt
0:43:28 playing a role? So your tear film, for example, your tear, like I know some people will say,
0:43:32 “Hey, if I have a watch a sad movie and I cry at nighttime, the next morning my eyes are super
0:43:39 puffy.” So your tears have salt in them. And because if you ever cried and tasted your tears,
0:43:44 they taste salty, right? So the challenge is that when you have salt, it’ll draw fluid into the
0:43:50 tissues. And so if people cry the night before, the salt remaining in the tears basically get
0:43:54 into the tear ducts and sit on the surface of the eye and the eyelids. And then that can
0:44:00 draw fluid into those tissues. There’s hydration play a role. That’s also something that’s been
0:44:05 looked at in the research is not really conclusive. I think hydration is still something we need to,
0:44:11 I do encourage people to at least be aware of their hydration. For dry eye, there is some
0:44:17 research that indicates that people who are drink more water tend to have less severe symptoms of
0:44:22 dry eye. When I see some with bags into their eyes, I used to think, “Well, I still kind of do
0:44:28 think that it just means that they haven’t slept.” That, again, I recently did a live stream where
0:44:35 I did research first and tried to look into this. And they have looked at quality of sleep, time of
0:44:41 sleep, and both this subjective and objective appearance of dark circles under the eyes. And
0:44:48 they find that it is, if you have not been getting good sleep, objectively your under eye dark circles
0:44:58 do not change. But your subjective appearance of your own image will go down. So they find
0:45:03 that for both sleep and stress. So you believe that you’ve got bigger sort of dark circles or
0:45:09 patches under your eyes, but objectively, in reality, you haven’t? Yeah. Because they can
0:45:14 measure the type of light being reflected off the surface of your skin. So they can see how much
0:45:20 pigment and what type of light is being reflected. And so they’ve been able to find, “Oh, that it’s
0:45:27 purely just your subjective opinion of your own self-image seems worse when you’re tired.”
0:45:32 What about stress? Because I’m thinking about people that I’ve seen that have big bags under
0:45:37 their eyes. And their eyes kind of look dark. I always assume it’s their stress and they haven’t
0:45:42 been sleeping. But you’re saying that that’s not accurate necessarily. So at least in the few
0:45:48 studies that I’ve been able to read that were published in the last five years don’t seem to
0:45:53 find that conclusive. There are other physiological changes that happen when people don’t sleep or
0:45:58 under stress, right? Cortisol releases, inflammation in the body will change, hormones can change.
0:46:07 So they may all play a role there. But right now it seems to have a less effect on the true
0:46:14 pigmentation of the eyelids. Okay. And the cucumber and the cold compress and all that kind of stuff,
0:46:19 does that stuff work in changing the appearance of dark circles and bags and demise? Because
0:46:27 when I filmed “Dragon’s Den,” a TV show in the UK, it’s weird because sometimes when I’m
0:46:33 under slept, I come into the studio and the makeup artist, she won’t say anything to me,
0:46:37 but she’ll just put the cucumber on. And I know what she’s saying. She’s saying, “You look like
0:46:41 shit.” But she doesn’t say it. And it’s always when I haven’t slept. So I put two and two together
0:46:48 and thought, “Okay, well, she knows that my eyes don’t look great today.” But is it actually
0:46:53 doing anything to the cucumber in there? The coolness effect, I believe, is going to be causing
0:46:57 constriction of blood vessels. It’s going to be helping the tissue come down and swelling. Just
0:47:00 like if you bend your knee or elbow really hard on something, it swells. There’s a little bit
0:47:05 inflammation. And so putting cool cold on there can help momentarily, but I wouldn’t do it longer
0:47:09 than 15 minutes. The reason why is because if you do it longer than 15 minutes, your blood vessels
0:47:16 that can go the opposite way and cause more inflammation. There’s other things like eye
0:47:22 creams. There’s a plethora of different eye creams on the market. Some of those do work to help
0:47:32 constriction. Some of those are to help truly remove pigmentation. And a lot of those products
0:47:40 can have effect, but it takes months to truly remove the pigment. So you’re talking, you’re using
0:47:48 that two, three times a day for like 14, 15 weeks. But outside of that, if somebody’s tried all those
0:47:53 other avenues, talked with their dermatologist or an eye care provider of any kind, and things
0:47:59 still aren’t getting better, there are some surgical procedures that can be done to help people with
0:48:04 the appearance of under eye bags and some doctor circles. What do those surgeries do? They either
0:48:09 use various forms of light or light therapies to help remove pigmentation. You have to be
0:48:14 careful around the eyes when it comes to those sort of therapies, but they do exist. And then
0:48:20 there’s fillers, like they’ll do hyaluronic acid fillers to change the shadowing effects around
0:48:26 the eye. And then there’s forms of what are called a blepharoplasty, which are true eyelid surgeries.
0:48:32 And for that, you would want to see an ophthalmologist who specializes in those type of therapies or
0:48:37 those type of surgeries. So if I never want to get dark circles, bags and bags into my eyes again,
0:48:44 what is the natural, easy solution? I do still encourage good sleep, eating healthy,
0:48:51 staying hydrated. I think all of those things are good habits to have because we know they affect
0:48:59 the body in so many other ways. If somebody is truly struggling with it, then you can look at those
0:49:05 various creams, but I definitely encourage people to talk to a medical provider or whether a
0:49:12 dermatologist or an eye care provider who specializes in that area. What about red light therapy?
0:49:16 So red light, there’s so much in red light. And this is, I’m glad you brought that up,
0:49:21 because this is something I’ve been diving kind of headfirst into, into the research for many
0:49:26 things in the eyes. With the eye bag specifically, I’ll say that there is some newer publications
0:49:32 showing that red light therapy can help with depigmentation around the eyelids and giving
0:49:39 the eyelids more of a youthful appearance. I do wage caution though, because there’s a lot of
0:49:51 products that are online that offer red light therapy for various reasons, but they’re not
0:49:59 really standardized very well. And so there are also publications showing people who’ve had damage
0:50:04 to the eyes because they’ve used these various forms of red light therapies, the devices they
0:50:10 bought online, because what the manufacturer states isn’t actually what’s being measured
0:50:14 when they do it in the research and find out, hey, what type of wavelength is this? How much
0:50:19 energy is being produced by the device? Because it’s not the specific wavelength.
0:50:25 The wavelength is important, but the amount of energy in the red light also super important.
0:50:30 And if you have too much energy, you can go through the eyelid and go into the eye and cause
0:50:36 damage. And so I think it’s really important. This is still a very early area of research
0:50:42 when it comes to the eye. And so I think I just urge caution to make sure whoever’s listening,
0:50:45 if you’re thinking about red light therapy or thinking about getting a red light device specifically
0:50:54 for eye care, definitely talk to a specialist who works in that area. But red light,
0:50:58 have you heard much about red light in different areas?
0:51:03 I’ve heard a lot about it. I don’t know a huge amount about it. And I have two red light panels
0:51:10 at home, which were given to me as a gift. My partner has one. We basically got each other
0:51:14 the same Christmas present one year. But we did ask ourselves, we sat in front of it one day and
0:51:19 said, what does this do in terms of our health? And are we allowed to stare at it?
0:51:23 The devices you come that you got, do they come with goggles?
0:51:35 No. Okay, so that is sort of the concern I have is, again, what energy is really not just what
0:51:40 wavelengths of light is emitting, but what’s the energy and also how far away from the device are
0:51:46 you sitting? What’s the recommendations? And specifically with the eye, there is evidence
0:51:52 that red light therapy can help with dry eyes. That red light therapy can help with macular
0:52:00 degeneration. Which is? So age-related macular degeneration is one of the leading causes of
0:52:06 blindness for older age adults. So 50 plus. In fact, if you’re over the age of 40 and somebody’s
0:52:14 legally blind, 50% of them, it’s due to macular degeneration. And so probably some of the best
0:52:21 research on red light in the eyes is on macular degeneration. In fact, it’s currently approved
0:52:27 and being used in Europe. It’s not approved in the US just yet, but it is going through FDA trials.
0:52:33 But that is a form of red light therapy. It doesn’t just use red light, it uses some near
0:52:38 infrared light and a little bit of kind of a yellow light. But they shine that in the eye
0:52:44 in intervals, and they do it for a few weeks, and then a few months you do it again. And for
0:52:48 macular degeneration, they’ve been able to show that not only can the protein that builds up in
0:52:55 the back of the eye in that condition diminish, but they can slow down and slow down the progression
0:53:01 of macular degeneration. And for some people, even restore eyesight. They can actually help people
0:53:08 see better. Using red light. Using that form of red light therapy. So again, very early research
0:53:17 right now. The challenge with all these at home devices, whether it be for dry eye, whether it be
0:53:29 for macular degeneration, there’s again concern about the power density and about the potential
0:53:35 change in temperature within the eye. Because that could cause damage. There’s also red light
0:53:43 being utilized and investigated in Asia and in Australia for myopia for children. And so it’s
0:53:49 something that is really fascinating. And I am looking forward to as more information comes out.
0:53:54 But I personally, when digging into it and trying to understand it, it does make me concerned of how
0:54:03 I think there’s just not as good a standardization or understanding of really how it works and which
0:54:09 devices are safe and which ones are more medically something that you should see a medical provider
0:54:16 for. I read in the Nature publication that a 2022 study with 20 participants receiving red light
0:54:23 therapy twice a week for three weeks found that they had improved tear reduction and other dry
0:54:30 eye symptoms compared to the placebo group. Tear reduction. What does that mean? So dry eye again
0:54:38 is an area where red light therapy is being utilized in right now. There’s several studies
0:54:45 on red light on its benefits for dry eye. But the two areas where it’s believed to help the most is
0:54:51 in helping you produce more of your own natural tears because the red light can shut down inflammation
0:55:01 within the tissues and help you produce basically it helps the cell read more energized. The mitochondria
0:55:10 within the cell can be activated by forms of red light and nitric oxide is also produced and then
0:55:17 you have higher amounts of antioxidants. And so these cellular components in mice and then now in
0:55:21 humans they’re finding that tear production can be improved. Which helps with dry eyes. Which helps
0:55:27 with dry eyes. But then also the red light can help with the mybomian glands in the eyelids.
0:55:33 Your eyelids have about 25 to 30 glands both the bottom and the top part of the eyelid.
0:55:39 Can you show me on that? The uh so it’s actually on the eyelids but the eyelids would be
0:55:46 Oh in front. They’re in front yeah. So so my top eyelids have about 30 mybomian glands in them
0:55:52 and my bottom eyelid has like 25 to 30. And every time you blink these glands have to release a little
0:56:00 bit of oil that prevents your tear from evaporating. And so there’s a lot of implications that go into
0:56:07 this but what happens is as we get older age is a big factor but then you also have more we
0:56:11 can talk about with device use and the fact that when we’re staring at devices we don’t blink as
0:56:19 often and we don’t blink as completely when we’re staring at a device. And so for that along with
0:56:26 diet and other inflammatory things the glands stop producing oil as well. They become inflamed
0:56:33 the oils go from being a clear liquid to being a thick wax. They become yellow they become cloudy
0:56:39 and they stop releasing oils into your tear film. And so with red light therapy along with other
0:56:44 therapies but red light has been found to help with getting those oils to produce at least a
0:56:49 little bit better. I think the research on red light in my bomingland dysfunction is still in
0:56:57 its infancy but we have a different form of therapy called IPL or intense pulse light which
0:57:05 has been even FDA approved for my bomingland dysfunction in treating dry eye. Is there any
0:57:10 research being done on red light in myopia i.e. red light and short sightedness? If I look at
0:57:15 those red light panels I have at home is that going to help with my progressive and short sightedness?
0:57:21 So there is research going into red light in myopia. It’s being done in children.
0:57:28 When it comes to the device you have at home I have no idea what wavelength that is. I have no
0:57:35 idea what power that is. The devices that are being researched and used in research are usually
0:57:41 at home desk mounted device that kids will stare into for about three minutes twice a day morning
0:57:47 and then night. And they are showing in those publications that they’re able to slow down
0:57:53 the rate of progression of myopia and even for kids who haven’t developed myopia they’re able to
0:58:00 prevent them from developing myopia which is really fascinating. There have been at least
0:58:06 there is at least one study that looked at those devices and there is some concern that perhaps
0:58:12 the power density is too high and could be at risk of causing damage to children’s eyes. So again
0:58:18 it’s still something heavily in research and I wouldn’t recommend people go and purposely stare
0:58:24 into a red light unless their doctor is prescribing it for something. And just because I’m an idiot
0:58:29 the red light is basically stimulating the mitochondria in the cell which is kind of like
0:58:33 the engine in the cell and that’s making it produce more of the good stuff.
0:58:42 Specifically ATP, adenosine triphosphate the cell uses for energy.
0:58:47 What about gazing at the sun because I’ve been told so many things when I was younger it was like
0:58:51 never look at the sun and then I got older and people are like no like stare at the sun
0:58:56 and now I don’t know what’s true. Yeah don’t stare at the sun. Even for like a second?
0:59:05 Don’t. So the challenge is sunlight is good for the eyes especially early on in the day
0:59:09 and of course toward the end of the day just so that you’re getting the signals to your brain to
0:59:16 hey the sun is coming up, the sun is going down, beta to kind of influence your melatonin production.
0:59:24 The staring directly into the sun though the sun is so powerful it can very quickly burn
0:59:32 holes inside your retina and I have a patient right now who she you know she’s comes in her
0:59:38 vision is not getting to 2020 we look inside the eye and she has burned holes a burned hole in her
0:59:45 retina that is we diagnose as solar retinopathy and so and I’m like have you been staring at the
0:59:51 sun she’s like yeah I’ve been sun gazing since I was little I was in Florida recently and I stared
1:00:00 at the sun and I was doing this for how many minutes and now she has permanent little blind spots
1:00:04 where she cannot see 2020 anymore. Where in there is that the colored part of the eye?
1:00:10 No so the the colored part is the iris but the light going through the eye is magnified so
1:00:16 strongly by the cornea and the lens inside the eye that ends up focusing on the part of the eye
1:00:21 called the fovea or the macula which is at the back of the it’s in the back part of the eye
1:00:25 imagine if we were going to play darts we’re going to go to the pub I’m going to throw darts
1:00:33 the center bullseye of the eye called the macula that part is your reason you see so sharply is
1:00:36 the reason that it’s the part of the eye that you’re using when you’re reading words when you’re
1:00:40 studying when you’re looking at your friends and family in the face you’re using that bullseye in
1:00:45 the back of the eye so when someone looks at the sun they’re putting all of that light energy focused
1:00:52 right in that area and then just a few seconds you can overwhelm that tissue causing chemical
1:00:59 damage to the retina. Because people this phrase sun gazing is this like a spiritual thing like I
1:01:03 think I was in Bali and people like no you can you can sun gaze you should sun gaze because it’s
1:01:12 good for you. Sun gazing what is this term? That is usually in some sort of either religious or
1:01:19 spiritual practice people will gaze toward the sun usually from my understanding it’s people
1:01:23 doing it in the early morning or late afternoon when the sun is largely going down the horizon
1:01:29 and because the light is indirectly being bent perhaps it’s not giving as much energy
1:01:38 to cause thermochemical damage to the back of the eye but the there is still a high risk and so
1:01:45 it’s always best to not stare directly into the sun or you know try to look off-center from it
1:01:51 and especially during the high UV times of the day you know 10 to 4 p.m. usually it’s good to be
1:01:56 wearing UV light protection not just because UV can penetrate into the eye but because UV light
1:02:00 damages the skin of the eyelid it can cause changes to the front surface of the eye people
1:02:05 get sunburn on the surface of the eye. Thank you that’s good to know I’m not going to look at the
1:02:09 sun I was being torn because I’ve got a friend who who told me that sun gazing is good for you
1:02:14 and you should do it and stuff but I’ll take your word for it you mentioned blue light a second ago
1:02:21 which is the light that comes off our devices is that harmful for my eyes? There’s blue light that
1:02:28 comes from the sun yeah really high energy that could potentially cause aging changes inside the
1:02:35 eye the blue light that comes from your digital screens does not have enough power and has consistently
1:02:41 shown in research to not increase the risk of aging eye diseases. It just impacts my sleep
1:02:46 potentially? It impacts your sleep there’s also some claims that blue light can affect your eye
1:02:55 strain but again research on blue light glasses on using devices shows that blue light does not
1:03:00 impact eye strain a lot of people will claim that they will have a lot of patients who come in and
1:03:06 anecdotally like oh my eyes feel so much better from getting the blue light glasses and that could
1:03:13 just be placebo effect it could potentially be the fact that a lot of blue light glasses will have
1:03:20 anti-glare or glare free protection put onto it and the anti-glare is probably improving their focus
1:03:26 and they’re not having as much glare issues when staring at the device but right now there’s still
1:03:32 just no concrete evidence showing that blue light is contributing to eye strain but then
1:03:38 the sleep cycle we do know that blue light can influence your sleep. What kind of gadgets do you
1:03:44 have I don’t know why but I assume as someone who isn’t an eye doctor you must have loads of gadgets
1:03:48 around your house that you use to because you know all of the information about eyes and vision and
1:03:54 stuff is that am I wrong? I mean I yeah we’re I have multiple computer screens open I have my phone
1:04:01 screen open all day I the other day I was texting a friend I’m like I’ve got two laptops open at a
1:04:09 coffee shop you know I’m like I’m doubling down on the blue light here so there’s a lot going on
1:04:15 there but yeah well practices is there are there any practices that you’ve been disciplined with
1:04:19 because you’re aware of the impacts it will have on your eye specifically on blue light
1:04:27 no all of it just overall eye health so the biggest things for myself is diet okay let’s
1:04:32 talk about diet then sure what do I need to know in terms of what I’m eating and drinking to make
1:04:39 sure that my eye health stays optimal so they’ve been looking at lifestyle factors on aging eye
1:04:46 diseases for for for a long time many decades the biggest one thing when it comes to diet and they
1:04:52 even have more recent publications a mentor of mine Julie Poteet she’s a past president of the
1:04:58 ocular well-initial nutrition society who I’m who which I’m a member of she even brought my attention
1:05:04 to a publication just this year from the American Journal of Nutrition they looked at the original
1:05:11 publication of a reds the age-related eye disease study that has large cohort of people like 4 000
1:05:16 people they watched over nine years tracking their diet tracking their eye health and how
1:05:23 things were changing and they find that just eating a Mediterranean diet green leafy vegetables
1:05:28 oily fish reduces your risk of developing conditions like maculogy generation specifically
1:05:34 slowing down the the progression of that condition in that specific city this publication that just
1:05:40 came out they showed that just having 2.7 servings of green leafy vegetables in a week not a day
1:05:46 but just even a week right we’re supposed to have more than more than that in a day but just 2.7
1:05:51 servings or more can slow down your risk of progression of that condition maculogy generation
1:05:57 by 25 percent from going from early to more of an advanced stage and maculogy generation leads to
1:06:04 blindness they can yeah especially as we get older because that condition and we can go into it but
1:06:12 that condition has a lot to do with your inflammation it has to do with metabolism and oxidative stress
1:06:19 that occur within the eye but green leafy vegetables at least 2.7 servings a week that’s that specific
1:06:26 study they find that oily fish eating two servings of oily fish a week slowed it down by 21 percent
1:06:31 and then they found a synergistic effect for people who ate both it was a 41 percent reduced
1:06:37 risk of progressing in that disease so and that’s not just the only study they find that people who
1:06:44 eat diets that have more fruits and vegetables that have oily fish reduced risk of developing
1:06:48 conditions like maculogy generation reduced risk of things like diabetic retinopathy
1:06:56 and so I try to focus on eating a good healthy diet I mean the thing that I heard growing up
1:06:59 was that you need to eat lots of carrots and then carrots will help your vision
1:07:07 so carrots do you know where that came from no that’s actually a it was propaganda started in
1:07:13 the UK by Great Britain from what I understand I’m sure there’s like a historian out there
1:07:18 who’s just like grumbling at me but from what I have read and studied is that I believe it was
1:07:25 World War two that Britain had was being attacked by the Germans and they were worried about German
1:07:32 warplanes dropping bombs on them especially at night time and they had already established radar
1:07:40 to detect warplanes coming but they didn’t want Germany to know that so they put out their own
1:07:48 propaganda saying hey our scouts can detect German warplanes better because they eat their carrots
1:07:55 because carrots have beta keratin which your body can convert to vitamin A which is essential for
1:08:01 nighttime vision and retinal health okay because I also used to hear that you eat if you ate carrots
1:08:09 you could see in the dark yeah so it’s a I mean it is based on some like vitamin A is essential
1:08:16 for photoreceptors in the back of the eye but most people are not vitamin A deficient by far
1:08:22 and so it’s pretty rare that we see vitamin A deficiency in the eye clinic unless you
1:08:28 happen to live in a place that’s pretty malnourished. You mentioned oily fish I was on your YouTube
1:08:35 channel and I saw that you did an experiment where you took omega 3 for 90 days I guess because
1:08:40 there’s some kind of implications for vision with omega 3? Omega 3 does play a role in the eyes
1:08:46 for two rays that specific video I was really looking at omega 3’s and its relationship to
1:08:53 my own dry eye symptoms because there’s a lot of studies looking at omega 3 and its dry eye
1:09:01 and the research is still a bit all over the place most eye care providers who specialize in dry eye
1:09:05 will say that you know there is a role for omega 3’s in helping reduce inflammation
1:09:08 that contributes to dry eye because a lot of dry eye disease has to do with inflammation
1:09:16 and so there is a large belief that it does work there are some publications of course that say no
1:09:21 it doesn’t it’s just the same as placebo and so there’s still some debate but omega 3’s also play
1:09:27 a huge role in the retina in the back of the eye the photoreceptors in the back of the eye within
1:09:32 the retina this again this kind of orange pink tissue in the back that picks up all the light
1:09:37 that you see the colors that you see it sends those signals through the optic nerve to the brain
1:09:45 so the retina is essential so the photoreceptors about 50 to 60 percent of the fatty acid content
1:09:57 of the photoreceptor is dha omega 3 and so there have been interestingly enough research showing
1:10:02 that diets that have more oily fish those people are less likely to develop macular degeneration
1:10:06 and they’re less likely to have problems with diabetic retinopathy if they happen to be diabetic
1:10:16 but then a lot of the publications on using omega 3’s supplements have not seen the same results
1:10:25 when terms of this form of retinal health and there is some insight they’re thinking they’ve
1:10:31 kind of figured this out and this is still very early research but so there is a transporter
1:10:42 called the mfsd2a this transporter helps transport specific forms of dha omega 3
1:10:48 into blood through the blood brain barrier into neural tissue and they’re finding that that same
1:10:55 transporter works for the blood retinal barrier as well and so newer studies looking mainly at
1:11:02 Alzheimer’s disease but they’re doing it on mice and they’re formulating a specific type of dha
1:11:09 called lysophospholipid dha that binds to that transporter and helps that get into neural
1:11:14 tissue and the current research is showing that with mice at least I haven’t found anything in
1:11:20 humans but at least with mice that the retinal health is improving they’re having better signals
1:11:27 through the retina as well as less risk of things like retinopathy so it’s still very early research
1:11:32 but so the omega 3 that I’ve got in my cupboard at home is probably not gonna help but the the
1:11:38 new versions of omega 3 that they’re working on probably will might and the reason why the current
1:11:44 omega 3s don’t seem to have that effect on the retina is because omega 3 fish oils are in the
1:11:50 form of what is called a triacylglycerol which your body can convert and deliver to get to neural
1:11:57 tissue but it’s not very efficient okay there are some forms of so if you are eating fish
1:12:06 fish krill and then like fish eggs do you like sushi yeah so fish eggs are often on sushi fish
1:12:13 roe those types uh like salmon I’ve read it has like up to one to 1.7 percent of these
1:12:21 phospholipid type of DHA so not very much but krill can be up to about 30 percent fish eggs
1:12:28 can be somewhere between 35 up to like 70 percent of these phospholipid DHAs and your body is able to
1:12:34 either turn those into triacylglycerol which is similar to the omega 3 fatty acid supplements
1:12:40 or it can turn that into this lysophospholipid DHA which your body can transport into neural tissue
1:12:46 at a better biofailability what did you discover when you started taking omega 3 for 90 days as
1:12:54 part of that experiment so that was again looking more at dry eye yeah and specifically I took
1:13:00 first I just looked at hey what’s my blood level of omega 3s right now just by diet and it was pretty
1:13:06 low at that time it was like 4.7 or something like that what you want between 8 and 12 percent
1:13:13 then I started taking I also did measurements of my dry eye symptoms uh my dry symptoms I took
1:13:18 dry measurements that we do in the clinic to diagnose objectively what’s going on with the
1:13:24 dry eye the dryness components and then I took it for 90 days and then I also tested my my blood
1:13:30 again at the end and I found that after taking those omega 3s that specific formula that it ended
1:13:36 up getting to about 9.5 percent omega 3 it’s like a hundred more than a hundred percent increase
1:13:41 so there’s a dramatic increase in the omega 3 in my blood and my dry eye symptoms also improved
1:13:47 now again that’s just an end of one you know just one person uh there’s a lot of dry eyes really
1:13:53 complicated too what is dry eye I don’t think I’ve ever had dry eye so dry eye disease is
1:13:58 a disease of the eye I think everybody can have symptoms of dry eye just if you walk outside
1:14:02 you know it’s a windy day maybe sitting around a bonfire or something smoke hits your eye
1:14:09 your eyes can feel a little dry you blink a few times but dry eye disease enters a whole different
1:14:16 state and dry eye disease occurs when not only is there a there could be a reduced amount of
1:14:22 production of tears it could be that your tears evaporate too quickly that’s a lot of people
1:14:27 and then what happens is that there’s a little bit of damage on the surface of the eye because the
1:14:34 the tear film has to stay stable to protect the tissue underneath if the tears are gone
1:14:40 the tissue underneath gets exposed to air and salt content of your tears ends up going up
1:14:46 what we call hyperosmolarity of the tears that higher salt content irritates the surface of the
1:14:52 cells and the surface of the eye here on the cornea it then has little micro damage
1:14:58 which your body tries to heal inflammatory proteins come out to try and heal that
1:15:03 no again if it’s just a small episode you’re walking on the street when comes up dry your
1:15:09 body heals it but if it’s a chronic condition you’re dealing with dryness all day long every day
1:15:16 for weeks months the inflammatory proteins never go away and the inflammatory proteins start signaling
1:15:21 your lacrimal gland to stop producing as much tears the inflammation prevents your eye from healing
1:15:28 and then the inflammation can cause the oil glands of the eyelids to start to basically cause more
1:15:35 irritation and stop producing as well is there one food in particular that is in your view the top
1:15:44 food for good eye health so green leafy vegetables what about sweet potatoes sweet potatoes can
1:15:49 certainly have help help you with things like vitamin a they’ve got other nutrients in them
1:15:55 I think are really good sweet potatoes technically have beta carotene right same thing as carrots if
1:16:01 you’re deficient in vitamin a your body will convert that beta carotene to vitamin a which is good but
1:16:07 mainly in green leafy vegetables you can not only get things like beta carotene but you can get
1:16:14 lutein and zeaxanthin which are amazing for eye health in many ways not just eye health but also
1:16:20 brain health what about sugar what impact does it you because you mentioned diabetes earlier I think
1:16:27 if I’m having a lot of sugar in my diet will that have an impact on my eye health it can for patients
1:16:33 who don’t or for people who are diabetic or have elevated blood sugars when you’re have too much
1:16:39 sugar in your blood it can enter into the eye it can cause the lens inside the eye to swell
1:16:46 and so with that swelling you can see a refractive change your power of your glasses contact lenses
1:16:51 that can shift and so that can sometimes be a tip-off if you were to see me in the clinic and I
1:16:55 noticed your prescription suddenly changed like two steps I’m like why is it making this big of a
1:17:02 change it may be a tip-off that hey maybe the blood sugar’s off we have to send you in for like a
1:17:10 diabetic workup do people with diabetes suffer more with that vision they can diabetes is it is
1:17:16 devastating for the the health of the eye because with diabetes when your blood sugar is elevated
1:17:20 it causes damage to the endothelium of the blood vessels and the arteries in the back of the eye
1:17:25 the things at the back of those things there yeah because the the back of the eye is one of the most
1:17:31 highly vascularized area of your body so as we can because you have blood vessels again on the inside
1:17:35 of the retina you have blood vessels on the backside of the retina and so when people have
1:17:42 damaged to those blood vessels the blood the vessels can start to hemorrhage they can start to
1:17:48 have little aneurysms they start to bleed in the back of the eye and then the function of the retinal
1:17:52 tissue is the retinal tissue is not getting the nutrients the oxygen and the nutrients it needs
1:17:59 to stay alive and so then people’s vision can deteriorate you can have a swelling in the back
1:18:07 of the eye in the retinal tissue itself we call macular edema and ultimately if people
1:18:12 unfortunately are diabetic they don’t know it or they’re poorly controlled they can bleed
1:18:19 so much in the back of the eye that fibrous scar tissue starts to form and it can even pull on
1:18:26 the retina and create a retinal detachment let’s pause for a minute and talk about today’s sponsor
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1:19:27 every once in a while my eyelid starts twitching what is that eyelid myokymia
1:19:31 is that what it’s called it is that’s the that’s the medical definition for it twitching eye i call
1:19:38 it twitching eye twitching eyelid like the eyelid starts going what is that so that is your threshold
1:19:47 of your eyelids to blink is your level of stress you’re like holding really tight muscles and so
1:19:53 they find and this is historically even in textbooks they call it basically the med medical
1:19:59 student twitching eye because it’s usually people who are stressed out people who are not sleeping
1:20:04 very well they’re fatigued and then people are drinking way too many stimulants like drinking
1:20:08 caffeine so i have a lot of patients who come in they’re like i’m having my eyelid twitch and i look
1:20:12 over on the counter and they sure enough have a have an energy drink with them and i’m like okay
1:20:24 so that that is largely what it is some people can have a true blepharospasm where the eyelids close
1:20:32 involuntarily and that’s more of an advanced medical condition so i think if people are having
1:20:36 just a little flutter on their eyelids usually not a concern it’s just get more sleep stop drinking
1:20:44 so much caffeine try to look at your stress levels and that’s a tough thing because even myself i
1:20:48 remember in college i remember saying the same thing to my doctor is like you’re just too stressed
1:20:54 and i’m like i’m not stressed i’m doing great then i go home and i start making a list of everything
1:20:58 i’m trying to control in my life i’m trying to control this for grades trying to do this
1:21:03 and excel in athletics i’m trying to do this at home i’m trying to manage this with my friends
1:21:09 and you know halfway through i look at the list i’m like whoa there is so much going on in my life
1:21:14 no wonder i actually am stressed i’ve just i’ve come so accustomed to it i haven’t i didn’t realize
1:21:20 it haven’t been that self-aware glycoma now glycoma is something that people over 60 typically get
1:21:26 from what i’ve understood is that preventable at all or is that just a consequence of aging and
1:21:32 what is glycoma so glycoma is where the nerve the nerve in the back here that connects the eyeball
1:21:39 to the brain so this thing here yes so the nerve that all of the retinal cells converge
1:21:46 onto the ganglion cells which are essentially sending the information from the eye to the brain
1:21:54 and so glycoma there’s different types of glycoma but the nerves die for some reason
1:22:03 so the nerves at the back here okay those nerves go send the information back toward the brain
1:22:10 so that you can see the challenge is that that nerve if it gets damaged the nerves die off and
1:22:16 when they die you can’t get them back so glycoma again there’s different types of them the most
1:22:23 common one that people think about is what’s called primary open angle glycoma and this is where
1:22:29 pressure inside of the eye builds up and if you think of a bike tire if you feel that full of air
1:22:35 and it gets to a point where it’s so filled the weakest part of the bike tire blows out
1:22:40 and that basically happens with the eye but the weakest part of the eye is the nerve in the back
1:22:49 so that increased pressure pushes on the nerve and slowly pinches it each of the ganglion cells
1:22:56 to a point where it starts to die off that’s not revustible is it unfortunately no when you lose
1:23:02 when you lose the ganglion cells they die we know that pressure plays a role in it the
1:23:06 internal pressure of the eye and so most treatments right now for glycoma are focused on treating the
1:23:14 pressure but more publications and research right now are also going into how do we better support
1:23:21 the health of the nerve in the back whether that be through blood flow is it better for us to have
1:23:27 some sort of nutrients getting to the to the optic nerve to give it more of a robust health
1:23:32 and structure to withstand the pressure so there’s more research going into it and the other thing
1:23:37 that i heard about when i was i was researching your work is this term eye floaters i’d never
1:23:44 heard about this before what is an eye floater so floaters inside the eye are so many people
1:23:48 have these issues and do you see them at all do you see little black specks when you look
1:23:53 left and right do you see little things probably i’m gonna say that maybe sometimes but i can’t
1:24:02 recall a time as we get older floaters do naturally start to occur these are the gel inside the eye
1:24:11 called the vitreous vitreous humor so opening up the eye again this large area that holds the shape
1:24:18 of the eye this is the vitreous humor and it’s mostly water collagen and a little bit of hyaluronic
1:24:25 acid but it’s like a jelly but as we get older this gel starts to break down and the collagen
1:24:32 begins to clump and it sits there suspended in whatever’s gel or fluids left and so when people
1:24:38 go outside it’s a bright sunny day they look at the computer screen it’s a back you know bright
1:24:41 backlight they’ll see these little specks floating around and they’ll shift their eyes
1:24:45 left and right and you’ll see it continue to drift and it gets really annoying it’s like looking at
1:24:50 a nat or a little bug flying around and really what’s happening is the light is just hitting
1:24:56 those collagen clumps casting a shadow on the retina and you see those floating spots the concern
1:25:04 is that some people develop suddenly a whole bunch of floaters and if you have a whole bunch of
1:25:09 floaters that could be because the gel which is attached to the retina in the back of the eye
1:25:19 that gel can tug on the retina and create a small tear or it can create a full detachment of the
1:25:25 retina can pull the retina off from the back of the eye usually though if you ever have symptoms
1:25:30 of a flash of light like a lightning bolt is going off somewhere in your vision that no one else saw
1:25:37 or you’re having a dark shadow coming down from the top of your top of your vision or rising up
1:25:43 from the floor or from the side that would be an indication that perhaps a sudden changes happened
1:25:48 and you should see a doctor as soon as possible but otherwise the development of the small little
1:25:55 floating spots those gradually occur with age and is there a way to treat them so there are two
1:26:02 surgical procedures to try to get rid of them however most surgeons won’t want to do them
1:26:08 because there’s always a higher risk of damage causing damage or other complications in the eye
1:26:13 how many people are likely to experience these eye floaters in their lifetime
1:26:18 basically every decade of life you gain another 10% chance of having these floaters
1:26:22 so by the time you’re most people yeah by the time you’re 80 years old you have an 80% chance of
1:26:27 having these floaters most people that I see coming in because of a complaint of floaters are usually
1:26:35 in their 40s 50s I’ve heard you talk about pineapple helping to cure floaters so there is a study
1:26:43 that came out several years ago that looked at using a type of supplement called bromelain
1:26:50 and that’s found in pineapple and that was a study that looked to see if people eating pineapple
1:26:55 could reduce their floaters that study was not the best study ever done
1:27:02 they did it was kind of a I think it makes me excited that at least there’s people there’s
1:27:05 researchers looking into hey how is there a way we can get rid of these floaters because they can
1:27:12 be really annoying if they’re really large they can obstruct people’s vision a more recent publication
1:27:21 from 2021 looked at a different formulation of different enzymes and vitamin supplements
1:27:30 that include vitamin C, lysine, zinc these can help preventing the glycation of collagen
1:27:36 and specifically within the vitreous of the eye and they did find after six months of supplementation
1:27:43 that people’s symptoms of floaters reduced it’s only one study and I want to see more but that
1:27:48 right now is probably the only supplement on the market that has probably the best research
1:27:53 behind it being it was a placebo control trial the pineapple study was in 2019 in the journal of
1:27:58 American science and the study said that people who had three slices of pineapple a day had a 75
1:28:04 percent eye floater improvement but you’re saying that that study is not super robust the medical
1:28:11 community the IQ community we don’t look at that with having the most scientific validity we do want
1:28:21 to see more research in that area anecdotally I’ve had people certainly message me on email and on
1:28:26 YouTube and on Instagram saying that it did help them but it’s hard to say if it’s truly placebo
1:28:37 we’re not I just one day saw it come in what you need to do is you need to get the pineapple
1:28:43 yeah what is it that you have it come in I remember one day I came in really freaked me out
1:28:48 didn’t know what it was yeah I thought I was getting some sort of disease or something I went
1:28:53 online and it was quite normal yeah but yeah I came in order to come and I kind of shifted around
1:28:59 I can look at it and like shift around by looking at the direction but it’s not there all the time
1:29:05 this will suddenly just drift into my side I think if somebody even especially if for anybody who’s
1:29:11 having floaters or seeing a spot like that I think it’s still a really important to have it evaluated
1:29:16 because there is a chance it’s not a huge chance but it’s like a five percent that you could have a
1:29:22 small tear or a hole in the far edge of the eye when the gel separated and in those cases then
1:29:29 if it’s needed they can use a laser to just zap it and tack it down so that you don’t develop a
1:29:35 retinal detachment because if you get a retinal detachment it’s an urgent procedure where they
1:29:40 need to repair the retina and get it back into place because it can otherwise lead to permanent
1:29:45 vision loss you know when you get something in your eye and it gets annoying I had it the other
1:29:50 day when I was in bed in in LA I was I had something in my eye and I could just feel it and you know
1:29:54 you you look in the mirror and you can’t see it and you someone tries to blow in your eye and get
1:29:58 it out and that doesn’t work either and you just feel you can feel it for maybe like 30 minutes
1:30:02 an hour what’s the best thing to do in that situation to get rid of that feeling in your
1:30:09 opinion and is it like a hallucination because I can’t see anything there so the eyeball it has
1:30:14 some of the most nerve endings on your body so even just something small piece of dust gets on
1:30:20 your tear film you can feel that and it can really irritate the eyes some of the easiest things to do
1:30:25 are using eye drops you know get a person get even just over the counter eye drops using those to
1:30:30 rinse the eye if somebody gets a chemical in the eye then you really want to rinse the eye really
1:30:35 good with with just even tap water you want to get water to flush it out you know if some you
1:30:41 know obviously you’re at a workplace they have wash stations for those sort of things so that’s
1:30:47 going to be the most important if the eye remains red irritated the body will produce more mucus to
1:30:52 try and fix the problem and so a lot of people if you get a little irritation it just never seems
1:30:58 to go away it’s because somehow there’s inflammation developing on the surface your body’s producing
1:31:03 more mucus things your body can sense that there’s more swelling there so the best thing to do is
1:31:08 rinse it out and go see the eye doctor especially if it’s not getting better so how often do you
1:31:16 think I should get my eyes tested yearly every year you should I say that because they’ve had
1:31:22 multidisciplinary um of different eye care professionals not just eye care but different
1:31:27 medical professionals in different fields look at the statistics and again it’s the fact that
1:31:36 it is one of the easiest least invasive medical procedures you can do to detect the most medical
1:31:43 conditions that can potentially prevent you from having more serious comorbidities later in life
1:31:47 Dr. Joseph what’s the most important thing we didn’t talk about that maybe we should have talked
1:31:57 about today I think probably the one of the biggest things that I personally really like
1:32:05 to reflect on we’ve touched on diet a little bit but I think diet and lifestyle paying attention to
1:32:14 how much not only what you eat how much you eat exercise sleep hydration focusing on these sort
1:32:21 of things can have a ripple effect on the eyeball but so many other parts of the body and that the
1:32:26 eyes are an extension of your brain and what’s good for the eyes is also good for the heart it’s
1:32:33 also good for your brain and so I think we need to be really aware of that and how important the
1:32:40 eyes are for your learning for your development for your risk if you if you have poor vision your
1:32:46 risk of developing dementia and Alzheimer’s in later years is greater that vision and eyesight
1:32:53 is really important for the development for children and their minds and so we we need to be aware of
1:33:01 how all of that is connected and how our lifestyles on devices all the time and being indoors so much
1:33:08 can also have an impact so seeing an eye doctor on a regular basis is really important even if you
1:33:16 feel like your vision is great and you see fine you don’t want to lose that we have a closing
1:33:19 tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest not knowing
1:33:22 who they’re going to be leaving it for and the question that has been left for you
1:33:32 is what is your most important early memory that you’ve ever had ever
1:33:38 one that does impact me on a regular basis
1:33:49 is just making friends when I was a kid I didn’t have many friends and I remember finally
1:33:58 making friends from sports and just having people over to play
1:34:05 have sleepovers and finally feeling like I had companionship of some kind
1:34:18 I think it kind of proved that I was that I that I mattered that I had value
1:34:26 was just or being seen being that I had a role in this world beyond just me being on my own
1:34:34 did you try to tell you otherwise I have a memory that I’ve shared mainly with my therapist
1:34:44 where I was in trouble I was grounded to my bedroom I didn’t feel safe leaving my bedroom
1:34:50 because my older brother bullied me at that age and I felt
1:34:57 that I did not matter that I was not wanted that I was only in the way
1:35:14 and I think over the course of my life that feeling that I needed to perform excel
1:35:24 was the only way for me to get attention to prove that I had value and worth
1:35:37 and so I think that’s driven me to excel in academics to excel in extracurriculars
1:35:41 it was a very subconscious thing something I was not aware of
1:35:50 and only recently in the last year have come more to terms with those early experiences in my life
1:35:58 and how they maybe have driven me and it’s goes through a lot of work to reflect on those experiences
1:36:03 and make friends with that part of your life and come to terms that like no I’ve grown up
1:36:10 I do matter I do bring value I am worthy of friendship and love
1:36:20 those are tough real things that I think internally we batter battle and sometimes don’t even realize
1:36:32 how much of that early experience inspired you to pursue the line of work that you do now I know
1:36:39 that you said it pushed you to excel but specifically focusing on the eyes somewhat connected
1:36:47 and when I was a kid again I was lonely I was an indoors kid I’d played a lot of video games
1:36:56 watch movies my brother he was the fisherman outdoors kid when I turned 13 entering into junior
1:37:01 high my mother wanted me to pick a sport and so I did the manly thing I want to play football
1:37:06 you know American football I’m going to tackle people it’s hard to play tackle football with
1:37:12 thick glasses on your thick glasses mm-hmm I was a I was a nerdy kid sat inside all day again I was
1:37:19 inside the glasses because I was myopic I went to the eye doctor to get fit for contacts
1:37:26 and fit it being fit in contacts changed me because suddenly I could play sports
1:37:36 making friends for the first time in a long time to having self-confidence because of that
1:37:42 and having that level of self-confidence I started to attract the attention
1:37:47 of the opposite sex girls start paying attention to me and at age of 13 that was like the most
1:37:56 important thing in the world and so continuing to grow up I was always fascinated with eyes
1:38:00 with contact lenses and I knew in later high school when people were like hey what are you
1:38:05 going to do when you grow up what are you going to do for college I’m like I don’t really know
1:38:11 but when I see the dentist I don’t like that guy he pokes and prods and makes my gums bleed
1:38:17 but when I see the eye doctor that guy’s cool every part of the eye exam is like black magic
1:38:25 I thought you know what I could be that guy and so that definitely influenced my that amazing
1:38:31 experience influenced me and I think most eye doctors have some experience like that where their
1:38:37 life was changed by what an amazing eye doctor they had before and they just want to pass that on
1:38:44 I want to help people have an amazing experience with their eyesight and experience the world
1:38:51 and have more freedom in their life to pursue education to experience and see
1:38:59 just the beauty of color nature really to experience the world and so I really want to
1:39:04 just give that as a gift to as many people as I can and I guess the confidence that it gives
1:39:09 those people as well as it did for you at a young age isn’t to be underrated
1:39:16 well thank god you did because you know you’ve helped many millions of people with a wide variety
1:39:21 of eye related issues and conditions and helping them understand both the more superficial elements
1:39:26 of their eyes but also the more sort of deeper progressive diseases that might risk taking away
1:39:31 their freedom in the way that you’ve described just there but I just want to say a big thank you for
1:39:40 let me think of a nice eye related pun allowing me to see more clearly as it relates to the
1:39:46 subject of eye health and vision and everything that’s interconnected so thank you so much Joseph
1:39:48 and thank you Stephen appreciate you man this is great
1:39:56 I don’t know how to say this in a way that you’re going to understand but perfected is
1:40:01 banging I’m an investor in the company I drink it every day the whole team drinks perfected every
1:40:05 day we have a perfected fridge in the office here’s why I like perfected typical energy drinks used
1:40:08 to give me these crashes and as a podcaster the last thing you want to do is be crashing in a
1:40:13 conversation the founders of perfected wanted to create an energy drink that wouldn’t create that
1:40:17 horrible crash cycle that many of us go through so they used matcha as the energy source and
1:40:21 somehow they also made it really really delicious they’ve just come out with this new flavor called
1:40:27 Juicy Peach and it is banging if you try perfected’s Juicy Peach and it’s not banging feel free to get
1:40:32 in my DMs and cuss me out you can pick it up at Tesco’s all-weight shows or you can get it online
1:40:37 and here’s a secret that you’ve got to keep yourself I’m going to give you 40% off perfected
1:40:42 just so you can try Juicy Peach yourself go to perfected.com and at checkout put in the code
1:40:46 diary 40 I’m going to leave that up for some time not forever that’s perfected.com and then
1:40:51 use code diary 40 at checkout when you try it make sure you tag me on Instagram and say Steve
1:41:16 you were right it’s banging