7 Health Tips to Help Protect Your Eyes, Easy Tips for Healthy Eyes

Health Tips to Help Protect Your Eyes

Think for a moment about how often we use our sight every day. Our vision allows us to admire nature's beauty around us, enjoy a good book, and appreciate the faces of our loved ones. Vision is so important in our daily life, in fact, according to the American Optometric Association's (AOA) annual American Eye-Q® survey, 40 percent of Americans worry about losing their eyesight over their ability to walk or hear.1 However, despite eyesight being among our most treasured of senses, we don't often take the steps needed to maintain our eye health throughout our lives.
Tips for your eye health
There are 5 easy ways to ensure you are routinely on the right path to maintaining good eye health and protecting your vision.

1.Look Away From the Computer Screen
Protect your eyes from eye strain when at the computer or watching television. If you are watching t.v., you are at a good distance from the screen. As for computer, try to stay at a distance (which might help to reduce, avoid or mitigate nearsightedness over time), be sure to keep blinking, and look away every now and then. A laptop should be on the lap or some distance away on a low desk, slid back on a desk, or on a keyboard drawer, not close in front of the face lying prone on a bed. A separate monitor should be toward the back of a desk, with the keyboard at the front edge of the desk or in a keyboard drawer. A bigger monitor and bigger font size is good for this.

2.See your eye doctor regularly.
When you are seeing well, or not having a noticeable visual impairment, it's easy to forget about making an appointment to see your eye doctor. Eye exams are not just for people experiencing changes in their visual acuity. An eye exam is an essential way to detect even the slightest changes to your eye health and, it can also detect other systemic health issues, such as glaucoma and diabetes, before there are any symptoms.2,4,6
If you presently wear corrective lenses, you should prepare for your office visit by bringing your current lens prescription or eye glasses, if available. Regardless of whether you currently have a vision correction issue, you should always bring your family's complete health history.2,4 Often, patients don't realize the connection between a larger systemic illness within the body and eye health. Alerting your doctor to any potential issues can help guide your doctor to the right course of action during your exam.
Eye care should begin at an early age, and should be part of your normal health routine throughout your lifetime.2 Our Recommended Eye Exam Schedule by Patient Age, offers guidance on scheduling your eye exams.

3.Eat for Good Vision
Protecting your eyes starts with the food on your plate. Nutrients such as omega-3 fatty acids, lutein, zinc, and vitamins C and E might help ward off age-related vision problems such as macular degeneration and cataracts, studies show. Regularly eating these foods can help lead to good eye health:
Green, leafy vegetables such as spinach, kale, and collards
Salmon, tuna, and other oily fish
Eggs, nuts, beans, and other non-meat protein sources
Oranges and other citrus fruits or juices
Eating a well-balanced diet also helps you maintain a healthy weight, which makes you less likely to get obesity-related diseases such as type 2 diabetes. Diabetes is the leading cause of blindness in adults.

4.Try a Seafood Diet
You probably know that omega-3 fatty acids can bolster heart and brain health, but they can also decrease your risk of eye disease. According to a study published in the 2011 Archives of Ophthalmology, women who ate canned tuna and dark-fish meat (mackerel, salmon, sardines, bluefish, swordfish) just once a week had a 42 percent lower risk for AMD than those who ate such fish less than once a month. “Fish oils and fish-oil supplements are loaded with antioxidants that help prevent the damage from free radicals that can cause diseases like AMD,” says Tanya Zuckerbrot, a registered dietitian in New York City. Another reason to go fish: Increasing your intake of omega-3s may also support healthier tear film. (Eat at least five to six four-ounce servings of fatty fish weekly.)

5.Quit Smoking
Smoking makes you more likely to get cataracts, optic nerve damage, and macular degeneration. If you've tried to quit smoking before and started smoking again, keep trying. The more times you try to quit smoking, the more likely you are to succeed.

6.Go for the Greens
Carrots have a reputation as the go-to vegetable for healthy eyesight, and it’s true that “getting shortchanged on vitamin A, a key nutrient in carrots, could contribute to the deterioration of your vision,” says Zuckerbrot. But the real star nutrients are lutein and zeaxanthin—pigments found in such foods as dark, leafy greens, broccoli, zucchini, peas, and Brussels sprouts. Researchers from the University of Georgia in Athens discovered that leafy green vegetables may improve vision by reducing the stressful effects of glare and exposure to bright light, because they help absorb some of that light. Find more information on how a healthy diet can protect your vision.

7.Never rub your eyes
This is what normally causes eye infections, because the bacteria on your hands/fingers get between your eyelids.