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Poor diet increases risk of vision loss

If you want to protect your vision in old age, make sure you eat healthy food. Researchers have found that people eating a diet high in red and processed meat, fried food, refined grains and high-fat dairy products may be three times more likely to develop an eye condition that damages the retina and affects a person's central vision.

The condition is called late stage age-related macular degeneration (AMD), an irreversible condition that affects a person's central vision, taking away their ability to drive, among other common daily activities.

"Treatment for late, neovascular AMD is invasive and expensive, and there is no treatment for geographic atrophy, the other form of late AMD that also causes vision loss. It is in our best interest to catch this condition early and prevent development of late AMD," said researchers.

The results suggest that that a Western dietary pattern may be a risk factor for developing late AMD.

However, a Western diet was not associated with development of early AMD in the study, published in the British Journal of Ophthalmology.

The authors studied the occurrence of early and late AMD over approximately 18 years of follow-up among participants of the Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities (ARIC) Study which was designed to investigate the etiology and clinical outcomes of atherosclerosis, a disease in which plaque builds up inside your arteries.

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