The Sweetness of a Simple Life by Diana Beresford-Kroeger

Author:Diana Beresford-Kroeger [Beresford-Kroeger, Diana]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-345-81297-1
Publisher: Random House of Canada
Published: 2013-10-21T16:00:00+00:00

SORE EYES

Carrots and computers go together …

When I was a little girl of six or seven, I loved to go for walks with my mother. We would strike out to a destination hand in hand. Very often the choice of location was mine.

Like most children, I had a favourite place of such glamour and beauty that it held me enthralled for days after each visit. It was a long avenue of golden chain trees, known in Canada more often as laburnum, set into a stone-terraced garden. The long locks of sweet-smelling, pea-like flowers dangled above your head while the pavement was a bright yellow carpet of spent blooms. I felt they were enchanted.

One afternoon in June a terrible accident happened. I shudder even now, when I think of it. A car passed by. The driver flicked a cigarette butt out the window. I was looking at the laburnums as the cigarette travelled through the air. The burning tip flared, bounced against a stone of the terrace and snapped into my eye. First, I did not know what was producing the terrible pain in my eye. I do not remember what happened after that except that I had a year’s worth of visits to the eye doctor because of the damage done to my eye.

The eyes work as photo receptors; that is, they take in reflected light and focus it to produce a visual image. This image is subsequently stored in the brain for recall and use as needed.

Suburban living with artificial lighting and fluorescent computer screens demand a high standard of sight from the working eye. To keep pace, the eye must be well fed with foods from a healthy diet that contain vitamin A. This vitamin is essential for healthy sight because it is the building block for the working machinery of sight itself. However, because the storage facilities in the liver are somewhat limited, it can also become a toxin to the body.

The gracious carrot comes to the rescue. Carrots contain carotene, which is the yellow-to-orange colouring of this root vegetable. Carotene is known as a vitamin A precursor. This means that a carrot, cooked or raw, is eaten and digested. In the gut there is a covey of bacteria, like maids-in-waiting. They inspect the carotene molecule and check supplies with the liver and blood. If vitamin A is needed, they snip the carotene into two identical pieces with an enzyme, delivering two molecules of vitamin A as the result. Vitamin A then may be shelved for storage in the liver or put into the mass transit of the blood, bound to a piece of protein called RBP or retinol-binding protein, and sent on its way to bolster the eyes for seeing.

Carotene or vitamin A precursor is found in many other plant foods also, especially the green leaves of fresh spinach, Swiss chard and beet greens. Usually carotene occurs with chlorophyll or the green matter of plants. There is a nice little trick that can cheaply increase the carotene content of all winter storage squash, which is another source.

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