Now you all know as an optometrist, we’re constantly recommending that people eat healthy for their eyes, for the average person, that’s easier said than done, that’s why back in 2015, I started recommending recipe books for my patients just to make it a little bit easier for them to be able to get healthy, nutritious recipes for them and their families. So with my go-to book now seemingly unavailable, I had to go back to the drawing board and discover something else that I could use. That’s why in this blog post, I’m going to be reviewing the new go-to book that I now refer my patients to for healthy, nutritious and eye care recipes.
So the book we’ll be going to be looking at is called Eat Right For Your Sight. In this blog post I’m going to be taking a closer look at what this book is all about and who the book is intended for, as well as delving into a bit more about how easy it is to use and look at the content in the book and then let give you my final thoughts and a conclusion on this product.
So this book is pretty unique in the fact that it is dedicated to recipes that are all about promoting a healthy macular and therefore healthy sight. Now, the macular is a critical part of the retina, is the part that gives you all the detailed vision that we need to see faces and see detail across the road, for example. The leading cause of blindness in Western nations is a condition called Age-Related Macular Degeneration, or AMD.
So signs and there is good science to suggest that we can influence the outcomes when it comes to delays in the rate of deterioration and the progression of age-related macular degeneration by eating good nutrition and good food that promotes healthy macular. So this book positions itself really as a book that is all about recipes that are rich in the necessary nutrients, vitamins, and antioxidants that science has shown to promote the health of the macular and the macular region.
Here is a link – Recommended video: Macular degeneration explained https://youtu.be/svEP6ggjetQ for my video for more details on what exactly macular degeneration is.
The authors of the book are Jennifer Thomson and Johanna Seddon, M.D., who’s also a macular specialist. They seem to have created this book in collaboration and also with the cooperation of the American Macular Degeneration Foundation, which is an organization, a charitable organization, I believe, designed to educate and help people with resources, who may be living through macular degeneration or they may be concerned about macular degeneration. So here is a link – American Macular Degeneration Foundation: https://www.macular.org/://www.macular.org/ to their website and just have a look at some of the resources that they’ve got available on their site now on their website, the aim of this book is also quite clearly summarized.
So I’ll an extract of that, “so the easy part of eating healthy is learning which kinds of foods are best foods like salmon, egg, corn, blueberries, peppers, leafy green vegetables, have parts in funding for varied and delicious ways to make them a regular part of your diet”. Eat Right For Your Sights takes care of that, providing recipes that make eating healthy a treat.
Who should be buying this book?
We should all be eating healthy for our eyes and therefore this book really should have appeal to everybody but in reality, if you are somebody who is in the higher risk category for macular degeneration, so if you are over 60 years or if you have a family history of it and you are concerned, then really you should be taking extra precautions and making sure that every meal that you consume is ideally promoting a healthy vision and healthy macular, so this book would be ideal for that type of individual.
Have a look now at what exactly is in this book, what the content is like, and how easy it is to make use of a book like this. Now, compared to the previous book that I had back in 2015, and I recommend it to numerous patients over the years. This book is, I’d say, a lot more down-to-earth in terms of the ingredients used, generally the recipes will tend to be a lot more, hearty down-to-earth foods and meals that will appeal to a wide range of people.
A common complaint that the other book tended to have was that some of the recipes of the ingredients, rather, were not necessarily widely available in your average supermarket or your local store, so I think the recipes here have a broad, wide appeal from that point of view.
The book also packs about 88 different recipes that I think are very well organized when we look at the index of the book, organized into the following categories, so we have small bites, soups, salads, main courses, your side dishes, your desserts and then your healthy drinks as well. I think that’s a good broad set of categories there that cover every kind of meal that you might envisage an average family having and each category has a good number of recipes as well, so you can potentially really make up a family food time table that will provide variation over several weeks without people feeling like they’re repetitively eating the same meals over and over again.
Now, this book provides some great information about the daily nutrition that we all need to take into account to maintain a healthy macular and as well as that, it does give us the recommended kind of nutrients and vitamins, as well as the daily recommended allowance of each of these and that’s super helpful when you compare that as well with the nutritional profile that they provide for every recipe in the book. So the nutritional profile of every recipe just gives you a breakdown of the vitamins and the nutrients in there and also the estimated amounts of that nutrient that you’re going to get in that meal, so you can kind of use that to tally up whether you’re getting your daily recommended allowance in each meal.
If you’re somebody who takes supplements as well, such as macular health supplements, then you can figure out whether, between that and the meals that you’re eating, whether you are exceeding your daily recommended allowance of any of the essential kind of nutrients and I think that’s where this book has the upper hand compared to some of the other books that you may well find in the market or the previous book that I have been recommending since 2015.
So we see the great care that’s been taken to make sure that we got a great variety of meals and recipes that allow you to mix and match and make sure that you’re hitting all of the essential nutrients and the vitamins, antioxidants that are all essential to the aim of this book, which is to make sure your macular is healthy.
Now, the other great thing about the recipes in this book is that nothing seems to need heavy cooking and that’s great because when we’re talking about extracting as much nutrition from the food we want to make sure that we prepare it in a way that the nutritional value of the food is preserved and not removed or stripped out by cooking it too much.
So what’s not to love about this book?
Well, there isn’t too much actually but what I will point out is if you are someone who is a meat lover and you must eat meat and every meal, then, many of the recipes in this book don’t involve meat but there is a good selection and you’ll also be glad to know that at the beginning of the book has a section titled What to Have in Your Pantry, What to Keep in Your Pantry. It gives you a list of different things just to keep, just in case, and things that I guess you can use to supplement your meals, and in that list is about 12 different lean meats. So there’s certainly not advocating that you remove all meat from your diet, so there’s a good selection there, but it must be lean meat as well. Now, having said that, a low meat diet is probably advisory when it comes to eating healthy for your side anyway, so that’s not to say you can’t have meat, but keeping it as something that you have occasionally is probably the sensible way to go and also make sure that meat is lean and quality meat as well.
So that’s kind of really as much as I say about that and that’s probably about the extent of what I could say that may be negative about this book. So as far as the conclusion goes, this is a book that I think is a fantastic book and it’s a resource that I now do recommend to my patients when it comes to suggesting recipes and giving them the kind of meals that they should be consumed regularly to maintain healthy vision and sight.
It certainly checks all the boxes in terms of the book itself being a convenient and easy to use, you can kind of reference come back to over and over again. It’s also handy size, it’s convenient for the kitchen that covers hard-wearing, enough that if you’re using it sensibly, it should last you many years of good regular daily use.
So it is a good book and here a link- Check out book reviews on amazon: https://geni.us/H6BqSU5 of where you can pick the book up from and you can feel free to check it out.
So let me know in the comments section below, do you currently eat healthy for your eyes? Is it something that you’re more likely to do now because of this book? And are you going to pick this book up as well? Let me know in the comments section below.
Thank you for reading and I look forward to catching you guys in my next blog post.
Take care.
