A Link Between Diet and Myopia?

lxmeister writes: "This article from New Scientist suggests that the refined starches in western food such as white bread and cereals may be the cause of an increased level of short-sightedness. Myopia now affects 30 percent of people of European descent. So brown bread is better after all!"

Comments

Er, after all?

[Violet Null]

Brown bread has always been known to be better for you. Even considering "enriched" white bread, and I use the term loosely, brown bread contains more nutrients and more fiber than white bread, and has a lower glycemic index to boot.

Brown bread probably isn't better Myopia

[WolfWithoutAClause]

In the past I've checked the Glycemic Index (GI is a measure of how quickly glucose is absorbed from food as regards insulin requirements) for brown bread. Contrary to popular belief, brown bread has almost exactly the same Glycemic Index; ok, its very slightly better, say 98 compared to 100, but this is far too small to make much difference.

Therefore brown bread would be unlikely to improve your sight.

On the other hand brown bread is more nutritious in other regards, so it's still better for you.

Re:wheat bread still bread

[raduga]

From the people who brought you epidemic levels of Cancer - Western Medicine!

I'll concede that our ignorance of nutrients and the broad web of interplay within the dynamics of our bodies is appalling but I understood the promotion of cancer to "epidemic proportions" to be more a function of our reducing infectious disease from endemic to much lower levels of threat. We're living longer; when our bodies get old, they break down and cancer is one of the major ways we break. With better nutrition (and elimination of the major sources of free radicals) we should be able to live longer and healthier for a longer time, but as things are, Western humans have better quality of life for longer periods than most historical societies have ever had. There are some communities who have managed to do better, but they tend to be very localised and at very low population densities.

Western Medicine works pretty well from birth to circa. age 40 or so, then gradually decreases in efficiency as we age. Medicine alone is not the problem here; most of us do not take as good care of our bodies as we can, most of us do not know how, or have any macro or micro understanding of how our bodies work, beyond the Sesame Street level. There's a widespread notion (the legacy of Pasteur no doubt) that cancer is a disease with a systematic cause and a systematic cure, if we can only discover them, but it seems to me more the case that cancer is what bodies do when faced with ultimate entropy. Galen/Vesalius/Pasteur et al didn't invent cancer. What they did was to eliminate most everything else. Whether their children will find way to postpone entropy and rebuild telomeres (and prevent cell metabolism from going wacko) isn't certain, but it seems evident that they will try. Westerners have a good track record for persistence, if nothing else.

It all might be missing the point. If quality and longevity are what we really want, lifestyle and environment changes may be more effective and more direct-

-but as long as there ARE Westerners living in Western cities, drinking Western poisons and eating Western abominations, they will continue to try Western medicine, and have some fair success. Its a cultural thang.