Does The Keto Diet Affect Your Eyes?

In recent years, the ketogenic (or keto) diet has become popular, with an increase in celebrity endorsements, specialty cookbooks, and anecdotes alleging dramatic weight loss. His original aim, though, was not to help lose the excess pounds but to alleviate epileptic seizures in infants. This diet seems to be the trendy new thing and while we're not here to decide how it can support you achieve your weight loss goals, we will warn you how it could affect your skin. As usual, make sure to consult with the doctor before making any major adjustments to the diet.

A Quick History

Keto is a high-fat, low-carb, normal-protein diet aimed at keeping the body in a stable state called ketosis, thus the term ketogenic. Your body typically gets its food from glucose, which comes from seeds, starches and refined sugar. However, somebody feeding on a ketogenic diet produces rich keto and helps the body to burn fat instead of glucose. Records from 400 BC indicate doctors in ancient Greece using a keto-like diet to cure certain illnesses, including epilepsy. Years later, in 1921, Dr. Russell Morse Wilder invented the term "ketogenic diet" and started to use it as a way of treating epilepsy, especially in situations where the medicine was not of benefit. However, a recent development is the use of the keto diet for accelerated weight loss.

That Equilibrium Matters

Maintaining balance is important, as are most diets. So much of something-even healthy for you-can be dangerous. The right mix of fats, proteins, and carbohydrates on the keto diet is what makes you keep ketosis running. And eating so much protein will get it thrown out. Even making sure you get all the nutrients you need from the food you eat is crucial. For eg, due to a malfunction of their optic nerves two people being treated on keto diets for epilepsy began having vision problems. They later learned it was due to a lack in vitamin B1, and their symptoms were resolved after several weeks in B1 therapy.

Influence On Eye Protection

There's not any long-term study on the effects of the keto diet on anything but epilepsy. There are also some important studies directly related to eye protection. This research, for example, and another one in The Journal of Neuroscience, both demonstrate that it has a significant influence on glaucoma. The latter study found that placing glaucoma mice on a two-month keto diet shielded their retinal cells from degeneration. There are also reports of people claiming that since following a keto diet they have had improved vision but there is actually no evidence to support these claims.

Ketosis and Glaucoma for Diabetes Sufferers

Glaucoma is a chronic disorder causing damage to the retina from the cells that relay visual information. Eventually, these losses can result in partial loss of vision to complete blindness. The higher glaucoma rates is seen in people who are already diabetes sufferers. There were still several people who saw the link between metabolic stress and this eye problem. Indeed, the findings of a study performed at the U.S. Northeast Ohio Medical University has shown that the ketogenic diet prevents retina cells from degeneration in their eyes and nerves in the brain. In the aforementioned analysis, feeding a ketogenic diet to mice that have been suffering from glaucoma for around two months has resulted in retinas being shielded from degeneration by improved availability of nutrition.

What If I Get Vision Fuzzy While On Keto?

When you follow the keto diet, there is a risk of having blurry vision. Basically, if you're just wearing the right eyewear and eye protection, you 'd have no reason to think. Diabetes or other diseases may induce the slight chances of having fuzzy vision when on keto:

• The hypoglycemia-This condition happens when the levels of glucose decrease to what the body wants. Clumsiness, frustration, thirst, trembling, sweating, and fatigue will also support truth. This can occur often in keto practitioners who do a cheat day, where they raise their sugar levels dramatically. This is how the sugar levels can drop rapidly within a couple of hours, or what people call reactive hypoglycemia.
• Thiamine deficiency – This issue resulted from a lack of vitamin B while on the keto diet, in plain words. When this happened, the patients underwent treatment with a thiamine supplement, and their vision remained clear.

Will The Keto Diet Improve The Vision Of A Person?

There are many explanations for opting for a ketogenic diet to enhance a person's vision, avoid aggravating medical symptoms and deter complications from happening. There are two major explanations for that here. The risk for macular degeneration is minimized by eliminating the unnecessary sugars from the diet. Macular degeneration can be related to a high glycemic index level, suggesting consuming tonnes of bread, pasta, and rice, in a study conducted by Tufts University. You minimize the risk of glaucoma by stabilizing the blood glucose levels. One of the side effects of keto, according to a report conducted by NHI, is that it helps protect the eyes from mitochondrial diseases, as well as retinal degeneration. 

The keto diet includes many ingredients that provide eye-friendly nutrients such as fish, leafy greens, peppers, and squash. This means you can lead to healthy eye health if you eat a lot of those things. These will be very great changes to every diet. Some users, on the other hand, mention getting dry eyes while on a low-carb diet like keto. As there are different alternatives to a keto diet, it can influence when you will feel this disorder. The four keto methods are normal, strong, cyclical, and targeted protein. The number of carbs to be eaten every day can be from 20-50 grams anywhere, and up to 600 grams for a cyclical diet, but only on certain days. There are a number of reasons that may affect this disorder, though, so it's crucial to see your optometrist and see precisely what affects your dry eyes.

Any Closing Reflections

So if you're worried about going keto for a bit and wondering if it's going to affect your eyes in any way, the response is: there are no reports demonstrating the long-term eye effects. For every diet, consuming as well equilibrated as possible is safe. Although others appeared to have had some beneficial outcomes, for example with respect to their glaucoma, epilepsy has been the most studied on keto. However, if you're able to instantly shed the extra burden of glasses or contacts, book your private, no-obligation appointment now. 

The Bottom Line 

We also need to take special care to cover our eyes. When switching from glucose consuming to a body fat consuming keto energy device, blurred vision can be part of the adjustment time for a limited number of people who go on keto dieting. The disorder is closely linked to the blood sugar variations, with extremely low levels causing hypoglycemia and impaired vision. Getting a cheat day on the high fat, weight lowering keto diet and overindulging in carbohydrates can also result in eyesight issues. This will raise your blood sugar levels, but as you stick to your low carb keto diet eating schedule, your blood sugar levels will drop, which can lead to hypoglycemia. If you are going to have a ketogenic diet cheat day, make sure to keep your keto carb load at a manageable level so your blood glucose levels don't spike. This would stop the subsequent collision that may result in blurred vision while preventing optimum loss of weight.