Most stories that feature shock diseases aren't very credible. But this story about blindness as a result of junk food was reported in the Annals of Internal Medicine. The teen, who was "otherwise healthy," meaning he reached his full height and didn't seem ill, continues his junk food diet with the addition of a multivitamin.
The story has been picked up by various news groups, including the Washington Post, who took a moment to attack veganism as a problem when the issue was junk food. Newsweek mentions an expert who estimates that 2 billion people suffer from nutrient deficiencies but that we have little information on what this does to eyesight.
Not to argue with an expert, but we do. As I write in The Eye Diet, we are suffering from a global pandemic of blindness. I've been wondering about why African eyesight is better than Asian eyesight, but the difference may just be the amount of junk food as well as the lack of sunlight.
More disturbing is that the child, once he knew about his condition and the cause, made no changes in his diet. I think this constantly confounds people who try to live on logic and expect logic to prevail. Despite going blind, the boy simply refused to change his diet. It sounds like the foods that were making him blind were also his comfort foods. He didn't like the texture of other foods, making me think he could have some level of autism/sensory disorder. And even with experts telling him to change his diet, he refused.
We live in a world where expert opinions no longer hold dominance over our own emotional story. So coming up with more data, creating more power point presentations, isn't going to fundamentally alter the course. What we need is a common consensus about our needs and goals as a society, our acceptance that harming yourself or others for short term benefit is shameful. No one in this boy's family cared enough to engage with him early on and get him to widen his dietary choices. He's going blind as a result. But his story is a metaphor for our times, when we can easily lose sight of the bigger picture, get distracted by short term gain from our greater good.
The story has been picked up by various news groups, including the Washington Post, who took a moment to attack veganism as a problem when the issue was junk food. Newsweek mentions an expert who estimates that 2 billion people suffer from nutrient deficiencies but that we have little information on what this does to eyesight.
Not to argue with an expert, but we do. As I write in The Eye Diet, we are suffering from a global pandemic of blindness. I've been wondering about why African eyesight is better than Asian eyesight, but the difference may just be the amount of junk food as well as the lack of sunlight.
More disturbing is that the child, once he knew about his condition and the cause, made no changes in his diet. I think this constantly confounds people who try to live on logic and expect logic to prevail. Despite going blind, the boy simply refused to change his diet. It sounds like the foods that were making him blind were also his comfort foods. He didn't like the texture of other foods, making me think he could have some level of autism/sensory disorder. And even with experts telling him to change his diet, he refused.
We live in a world where expert opinions no longer hold dominance over our own emotional story. So coming up with more data, creating more power point presentations, isn't going to fundamentally alter the course. What we need is a common consensus about our needs and goals as a society, our acceptance that harming yourself or others for short term benefit is shameful. No one in this boy's family cared enough to engage with him early on and get him to widen his dietary choices. He's going blind as a result. But his story is a metaphor for our times, when we can easily lose sight of the bigger picture, get distracted by short term gain from our greater good.
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