Avoiding retinal diseases isn’t simply a matter of remembering not to lean in too closely to your computer screen. Eating vegetables with certain vitamins and other helpful compounds can keep both your eyesight and overall culinary experience from becoming compromised. Make a dish from any one of these 5 vegetables and your perspective will definitely improve.
Carrots
Although most people know that carrots help keep your eyes healthy, few can specifically tell you why. Luckily, you can now join the ranks of the informed. The crunchy orange vegetable is full of beta-carotene, which is a pigment known as a carotenoid. Fun to say, but much better to ingest, carotenoids are full of Vitamin A, which helps prevent cataracts from forming in the eye.
Chilli Peppers
The good news: chilli peppers are an excellent source of beta-carotene, Vitamin C, zeaxanthin and lutein. The bad news: rubbing your eyes after your chop up a chilli pepper will make your eyes burn and your inner critic chuckle disapprovingly. Our recommendation? Don a pair of gloves, chop up a gaggle of the little suckers, and then mix them with some olive oil and garlic. Remember, these vegetables are meant to improve your eyesight, not temporarily obscure it.
Leeks
Leeks have never attracted much notice. Aside from being green and bulbous, leeks are considered to be fairly boring, even within the remarkably sedate vegetable community. But that’s where leeks have been cruelly misjudged. They may not be much to look at on the outside, but chop up a leek and throw it in a stew, and its interior wholesomeness (specifically, its zeaxanthin and lutein) will quickly become evident.
Leaf Lettuce
If you find yourself stranded in a poorly stocked salad bar, you can still get some beta-carotene from iceberg lettuce. But should you be anywhere else—say, where they sell lettuce with deep greens and feisty red edges—then you should partake of the more colourful and infinitely tastier lettuce varieties. The general rule with lettuce is that the more colourful and textured it is, the more carotenoids it has to give. Optometrists and fussy dinner guests agree: colourful leaf lettuce is the ONLY kind you should serve in a salad.
Spinach
Upon his retirement from being a cartoon, legendary spinach eater Popeye went on to author several bestselling books about his unnaturally keen eyesight. “I’m Not on Top of a Mountain, But I Have a 50 Mile Visibility” became enormously popular among air traffic controllers, sailors and optometrists. Popeye’s chapter, “Cook It And See!” detailed the heightened nutritional value of cooked spinach, which contains Vitamin C, zeaxanthin, beta-carotene, and lutein. Critics have singled out this shift from raw spinach to cooked spinach as evidence of Popeye’s artistic growth.
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