An amazing pair of new studies that coincidentally (synchronicity!) came out at the same time, but without the authors seemingly knowing each other or citing each other’s work. One of the studies dispels the ubiquitous myth that high blood glucose is what causes eye damage, especially in diabetics and old people. Debunking a myth of that magnitude should be front-page news, yet mainstream media has very little to say about this. Outside of the 2-3 specialized medical news outlets, I could not find a single reference to these studies in any of the mainstream press outfits tasked with shaping public opinion on health matters. Aside from debunking the “sugar hypothesis”, as the study itself called the dietary myth of eye damage, another interesting finding was that the damage to the retina was detectable years before the person became obese and\/or developed diabetes. The study did not suggest a “dietary cause” of the eye damage, but the second study did, demonstrating that high-fat diets are to blame and we know such diets precede obesity\/diabetes. The second study found that high-fat diets increased the formation of vitamin A degradation products, known as bisretinoids, in occular tissues. Those degradation products are known to cause damage to the retina directly, but they also participate in the formation of retina lipofuscin. The latter, just as lipofuscin found elsewhere in the body, is a byproduct of PUFA peroxidation. In fact, the study specifically calls out the PUFA linoleic acid as a causal factor of eye damage already identified by prior studies. Thus, it seems that dietary PUFA is once again the main driver of a chronic and progressive pathology that had mystified scientists for a long time, while an innocent bystander (sugar) got the blame. Vitamin E is probably a good therapeutic choice to consider in this context, not only because it helps limit PUFA peroxidation and thus lipofuscin formation, but also because some studies suggest it can actually remove lipofuscin already accumulated in tissues. As per a recent blog post of mine, aspirin and\/or eugenol are other substances that can both prevent lipofuscin formation as well as removed already accumulated one.<\/p>\n
https:\/\/jbiomedsci.biomedcentral.com\/articles\/10.1186\/s12929-023-00895-6<\/a><\/p>\n