Lifestyle Choices

Not only are your eyes the truest of all physical reflections of who you are, they are also an ageless expression of beauty. For there can be something breathtaking about the eyes of an old woman, as there is about the eyes of a child. Like any other part of your body, to be beautiful your eyes have to be healthy, and to be healthy they need care.

But the care they need is quite different from what we are usually led to believe. For eyes are not the delicate, poor, vulnerable things we have been taught they are—overworked, constantly struggling against inadequate light and overstrain, and longing for some well-deserved tinted glasses to rest them. Far from it. Your eyes are tough. They were made for use, and the more you use them, to read and to see with, and the more you exercise the muscles around them, and the more they are exposed to the full spectrum of natural sunlight, the healtheir and more beautiful they will be. And not only will your eyes benefit, so will the rest of your body.

How do you see?

Sight is a highly complex phenomenon. In fact, it is not your eyes that do the seeing but your brain. Electromagnetic waves in lengths between 0.38 and 0.8 micron (a micron is a millionth of a meter) in the form of light patterns are received by the eye and then pass through it onto the retina, a layer of photosensitive cells at the back of the eyeball. These cells pick up the light and, through a series of photochemical reactions, pass on a nerve impulse by way of the optic nerve to the visual center of the brain, where you can instantaneously “see” the object in front ofyou. The retina is made up of two sorts of light receptor cells: cones and rods. The cones, in the center are activated when we are in bright light, so we can see fine details and color. The rods, at the periphery, work in dim light. You have about 7 million cones and 120 million rods in each eye.

The part of the eye that allows you to focus (and which is usually at fault when there is a vision problem such as nearsightedness or farsightedness) is the crystalline lens in the front of the eyeball, which changes from an elliptical shape when you are looking at distant things to a shape more like a sphere when you are examining something close up. This variation takes place thanks to a group of muscles that hold the lens. They are highly elastic when your body is young but become much less so as you get older. This, along with the thickening and hardening of the lens itself, is responsible for presbyopia, the inability to focus on things close to you, which is experienced by the majority of people over the age of forty-five.

A window to the Body as Well as to the Soul

The eye appears to be a window not only to the soul but also to the internal state of the body. A doctor looking into the eye with the use of a light is able to see if the patient is suffering from many more things than just those ailments affecting the eye itself. Such troubles as diabetes, leukemia, atherosclerosis, and kidney disease can all show up there. Even the presence of 80 percent of all brain tumors is evident from an examination of the shape and color of the optic nerve and the fundus, at the back of the eye.

The light entering your eyes appears to do a great deal more than simply transform electromagnetic wave patterns into nerve impulses for your brain to interpret as images. There is considerable evidence that, acting directly on the pigment granules in the epithelial cells of the retina, it also stimulates the pineal gland, the hypothalamus, and the pituitary gland through neurochemical channels, thereby influencing the health of the whole body.

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