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For your eyes only

12/02/2004

According to researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston eating fruit regularly earlier in life may help ward off macular degeneration, the leading cause of vision loss in older adults, reports Reuters. They compared data from 77,562 women and 40,866 men for 12 to 18 years and found that there appears to be no strong protective effect from vegetables, vitamins or carotenoids — the compounds that make some fruits and vegetables red, orange or yellow — as some earlier research suggests. Both men and women who consumed three or more servings of unspecified fruit a day had a 36 percent decreased risk of developing macular degeneration.