Ever wondered why they say eyes are the windows to the soul? Well, we learned a new way to understand that old cliche during our chat with Dr Kerry Gelb. Dr. Gelb is an optometrist who has been inspecting these windows since 1984. His wealth of knowledge and his passion for preventative health shines through as he explains how our eyes can reveal more about our overall health than we ever imagined.
Gelb says that inflammation is a major culprit in many eye diseases, and he's got advice on how to fight it off. And if you thought nutrition was only about maintaining a healthy weight, Dr Gelb's insights on preventing macular degeneration through dietary changes is a wake-up call.
From wild salmon and organic fruits to hydration and exercise, there's a lot we can do to keep our eyes - and bodies - healthy. He describes the role of specific nutrients in preventing eye diseases like macular degeneration and cataracts.
Connect with Dr. Gelb: drkerrygelb.com
Chances are, you wouldn't be listening to this podcast if you didn't need to change your life and get healthier.
So take action right now. Book a call with Dr. Ovadia's team.
One small step in the right direction is all it takes to get started.
How to connect with Stay Off My Operating Table:
Twitter:
Learn more:
Theme Song : Rage Against
Written & Performed by Logan Gritton & Colin Gailey
(c) 2016 Mercury Retro Recordings
Ever wondered why they say eyes are the windows to the soul? Well, we learned a new way to understand that old cliche during our chat with Dr Kerry Gelb. Dr. Gelb is an optometrist who has been inspecting these windows since 1984. His wealth of knowledge and his passion for preventative health shines through as he explains how our eyes can reveal more about our overall health than we ever imagined.
Gelb says that inflammation is a major culprit in many eye diseases, and he's got advice on how to fight it off. And if you thought nutrition was only about maintaining a healthy weight, Dr Gelb's insights on preventing macular degeneration through dietary changes is a wake-up call.
From wild salmon and organic fruits to hydration and exercise, there's a lot we can do to keep our eyes - and bodies - healthy. He describes the role of specific nutrients in preventing eye diseases like macular degeneration and cataracts.
Connect with Dr. Gelb: drkerrygelb.com
Chances are, you wouldn't be listening to this podcast if you didn't need to change your life and get healthier.
So take action right now. Book a call with Dr. Ovadia's team.
One small step in the right direction is all it takes to get started.
How to connect with Stay Off My Operating Table:
Twitter:
Learn more:
Theme Song : Rage Against
Written & Performed by Logan Gritton & Colin Gailey
(c) 2016 Mercury Retro Recordings
Here we go. Welcome back folks. It's the stay off my operating table. I'm Jack Heald, joined by the man who fixes hearts, dr Philip Ovedia. Phil, who do you have for us today?
Speaker 2:Phil Ovedia. Well, today we got a man who fixes eyes with us today, Dr Kerry Gelb, who's an ophthalmologist and really has been doing a lot of great work on the preventative front as well. So really excited to have this conversation, talk about the movie project and documentary and all of the great work that Dr Gelb is doing. So with that, Kerry, why don't you give a little bit of your background to our audience and then we can start talking about all the good stuff?
Speaker 3:Kerry Gelb. Well, thanks for having me, dr Ovedia, I'm an optometrist, by the way, I have been practicing optometry since 1984. I did my residency in 1984 and 1985 at the VA hospital in Queens, new York. I have a documentary called Open your Eyes which shows the relationship between the eye and systemic disease. The documentary is really interesting because we go to different places in the world. We were in Nacoya, costa Rica. The reason we were in Nacoya, costa Rica, is because we wanted to see how the centenarians lived and if they had different eye disease than people in the West. So we were in Costa Rica. We went to Canada, we interviewed Jason Fung and in Mexico we interviewed Jack Cruz. So we did a lot of great interviews showing the relationship between the eye and systemic disease. We also have a podcast called Open your Eyes with Dr Kerry Gelb, which is on all your podcast stations and channels. You can see it on YouTube if you want to see us, or you can listen to it.
Speaker 3:I'm also the health guy in Minneapolis on AM 1280, the Patriot, saturday mornings, 9am Central Time, where I do a lot of integrative medicine. We talk about health and integrative medicine along with eye. I notice a lot. We do a lot of talks where we interview famous ophthalmologists and optometrists about the eye. But I also notice my passion is integrative and preventative health, similar to yours, dr Ovedia, trying to keep people from going blind.
Speaker 3:And at the same time we know the eye bone is connected to the heart bone and the toe bone. So if we could keep your eyes healthy a lot of times, we could keep the rest of you healthy. And because the eye, we could see the capillaries in the eye at eight microns, eight to 10, eight to 12 microns we could tell if somebody is going to start to get disease in those capillaries. If they're going to get disease here, they're going to get disease here, they're going to get disease here and the kidneys. So the eye is really the window to our health. So yeah, that's a little bit about me. I practice optometry in New Jersey, in Woodbridge, new Jersey. About half my time is practicing and the other half of my time is doing my podcast, my radio show or making films.
Speaker 2:So tell us a little bit about what first got you interested in the preventative stuff. I mean, like so many of the specialties that we deal with, we all have our insight into these disease processes developing, but most practitioners don't really focus on the preventative stuff. So what's your story? How that became a focus of what you do?
Speaker 3:So I had a cold like eight months out of the year and I'm examining patients and I was wearing a mask before people wore masks because I had a cold all the time and I couldn't kick it. And finally my wife said to me I'm going to get rid of your cold. And I said what do you know about getting rid of my cold? I've had this cold for years and I can't get rid of it. So she bought a juicer from Costco and the juice man the old fashioned juice man juicer and she starts making juice and the vegetables are flying all over the kitchen and making a giant mess. And she goes no, this is going to help you. She goes you don't have enough nutrients. I said what do you know about help? She goes just listen to me. I think this will help you. So I started drinking the juice and after three days my cold was gone. And then I read a book by Gary Noll on juicing. You probably heard of Gary Noll. He's a famous. He's had a famous podcast. He talks about health and nutrition for many years. And I read his book on juicing and I started juicing and because I was juicing, my cold went away and I started.
Speaker 3:Then I was asked to give a lecture for the NJSOP, which is the New Jersey Society of Optometric Physicians, and one of them was on diabetes and the other one was on technology, because I have a lot of technology in my office. And one was on technology and I read a book by. I started listening to audio digest of internal medicine, ophthalmology, audio digest of endocrinology and I probably knew more about diabetes than any endocrinologist in the country because I'm a very type one, a personality, and I listened to all these experts on the conventional way of treating diabetes. But then I read Mark Hyman's book, started reading some of Mark Hyman's book it was before his diabetes book came out, but I kind of got the feel for it and Dan this Dr Merkin who was a radio doctor in the DC area, and I integrated the integrative part to my diabetes lecture and from there I really became interested and I said you know, there's another part of helping people other than the way we're taught, we're convened with drugs and surgeries and with us classes and contact lenses.
Speaker 3:There's something that we're missing and the number one cause of blindness is above 55 is macular degeneration. Other 55 in the working class population is diabetes and a lot of people have dry eyes, come into us and those are diseases that are mostly nutrition related. So I really got interested in that and I realized there are other ways I could help my patients and there's a leg of preventative medicine with nutrition and exercise the whole lifestyle of medicine and that really helped my patients and it made me very popular and I started getting patients from all over the place and I was getting referrals from all these medical doctors who were seeing patients who weren't getting any results and they started referring me patients and I since became friends with them, especially the ones that do integrative medicine. You might have heard of Derek DeSilver. I've had him on my show. I'm very friendly with Chris Kenobi I know you've had him on your show and so we're good buddies and that's really kind of how it started for me.
Speaker 1:You said two different diseases diabetes and macular degeneration. We talk an awful lot about how to deal with diabetes on this show. The macular degeneration is not one that has made the list so far and you said, if I heard you correctly, that that's a nutrition. There's a nutrition component to macular degeneration.
Speaker 3:Yes. So before, in the 1800s, there were basically no chronic diseases until processed foods started. So we started with the processed food the polyunsidic fatty acids, the refined carbohydrates, sugars, trans fats. And once processed foods started, that's when chronic disease started, whether it was cancer, cardiovascular disease, and macular degeneration runs with those diseases. So we know that macular degeneration is a disease of inflammation and if we could decrease inflammation and make people healthier, we could decrease the risk of macular degeneration.
Speaker 3:And unfortunately there's about two million people worldwide that are blind from macular degeneration, at about 20 million people in the United States that actually have macular degeneration and about 300,000 people over the next five years are at risk for it. So macular degeneration in the center of the eye is a part the center of the eye is called the macular and in the middle of the macular is called the fovea. And if you have poor nutrition and you're genetically predisposed, you're at greater risk for macular degeneration. So conventional medicine says that genetics is about 70% cause of macular degeneration. But if you look back, genetics hasn't changed over the last 100 years. There was no macular degeneration before about 1880. And since we started with processed foods and lack of nutrition, there's a lot of things that we could do. First, you want to eat whole foods and there's a whole 10 point plan I could go into for decreasing your risk of macular degeneration.
Speaker 2:When you want me to do that, yeah, it's very before we get into that, I'll just note how interesting it is to hear you talk about macular degeneration, and it's mostly genetic, the concept that is mostly genetic, but somehow it's been increasing exponentially despite the fact, like you said, that genes don't change that quickly and of course that very much mirrors the story around heart disease and in fact we know that there is an interrelationship people that are at have macular degeneration or at increased risk of developing heart disease and vice versa.
Speaker 2:So now we would have to kind of expand that thinking to say, well, somehow people got both genetic mutations somehow to make them, unless we recognize what you and I and many others know, which is that they share a common root cause and that's the metabolic disease from the foods that we're eating. So yeah, let's talk about kind of preventative strategies that you recommend for people with macular degeneration because, as Jack said, we haven't really dove into. We've only mentioned that with you know, when we had Chris on, and it would love to hear your perspectives on how best to prevent this disease.
Speaker 3:So everything I'm going to tell you is pretty much in the literature and almost everything I'm telling you I could back up. I could tell you from years of clinical practice that it's very, very true. So first things is, we want to decrease inflammation. As we know, inflammation is a core component to chronic disease. So first, we want to get people to avoid certain things. So we want to avoid smoking, we want to avoid the big belly, you know metabolic syndrome. That big belly, as we know, is an endocrine gland and it's giving off inflammatory mediators and that inflammation. We want to decrease High glycemic foods, sugars. We want to decrease the high glycemic foods, the white fluffies, the pastas, the potatoes. We want to decrease that High fructose corn syrup. We want to avoid that. Soda and sweetened drinks, dairy products. We want to decrease inflammation. We want to stay away from artificial sweeteners, grain fed meat of course grass fed meat is fine. We want to try to stay away from grain-fed meat, trans fats and environmental toxins like phthalates and pesticides. But what do we want to eat? We want to eat things that we know will decrease inflammation, such as wild things that have omega-3s in it, such as wild salmon, sardines, anchovies, mackerel. These are things that have omega-3s and that we know that omega-3 is very protective to the eye. In fact, there's been many studies that show that people who have diets high in omega-3s versus low in omega-3s there's a 40% decreased risk of macular degeneration. Again, we want to be on an anti-inflammatory diet. We want to be on organic vegetables and organic fruits. We like to be three-to-one vegetables to fruits, raw, unsalted nuts and seeds, grass-fed, hormone-free, antibiotic meats, turkey and chicken, including an egg, including the yolk. The yolk has a lot of lutein in it and lutein is very protective to the pigment of the eye.
Speaker 3:We want to build the pigment in the back of the eye. We build it with lutein, mesozyxanthin and zeaxanthin. We get that from dark green leafy vegetables. We get it from eggs, but we get it from kale, spinach, collard greens, yellow-orange peppers and we get it from the plant. One of the things that people don't realize also is that goji berries you can get them in the health food store. They're full of zeaxanthin and they actually have more vitamin C than an orange. They have, I think, 23 different amino acids. Go to the health food store and get goji berries. They're sweet. They taste good. Obviously there's a little bit of sugar in them because it's a fruit, but they have a lot of something called zeaxanthin.
Speaker 3:We want to pigment the back of the eye with the lutein, mesozyxanthin and zeaxanthin. The more pigment in the back of the eye, the more protection we have to prevent macular degeneration. That pigment does other things that are very important to us. For us, it helps us see better. It helps us when we're going from dark to light to be able to see better. If you play sports like baseball, it helps you with temporal processing speed. I've seen kids my son, I have a 13-year-old who plays baseball and I'll put some of his friends that swing and miss constantly, put them on this product luteinzeaxanthin, mesozyxanthin. They won't swing and miss as much because it helps temporal processing speed. They've done a number of studies on this.
Speaker 3:We recommend that people drink water eight glasses, eight ounce. We recommend that they drink about three liters of water a day. Putting in organic green tea Spices. A lot of spices decrease inflammation, like cinnamon, rosemary, oregano, himalayan salt. We want the vitamin D. We know through studies that if vitamin D is in the optimal range 60 to 80, we could decrease macular degeneration by about 40%, compared to whose vitamin D is in the low range Stress reduction exercise. We know there's a number of studies that show that exercise decrease macular degeneration. Decrease the progression of macular degeneration. Also decrease cataracts. You could take supplements that have luteinzeaxanthin and mesozeaxanthin.
Speaker 1:You've used the words about four times now and I still haven't understand it, lutein.
Speaker 3:So these are plant pigments. They're called carotenoids.
Speaker 1:Okay, Carotenoids. I've heard that word.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so they're carotenoids. They're plant pigments that we get from spinach and green vegetables.
Speaker 1:Okay, and what was it? Lutein L-U-T-E-I-N.
Speaker 3:Uh-huh.
Speaker 1:All right.
Speaker 3:This is Anthon. Welcome to the 읽 and mesoziazanthin and these three carotenoids okay.
Speaker 1:You were talking about measles. Okay, sorry to interrupt you, but no, no, no, no, no.
Speaker 3:I know that.
Speaker 1:I'm the resident idiot here, so I got it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, while we're digging into that, two questions on the zazanthin and mesoziazanthin. One, you know, how does it relate to astrazanthin, which is, you know, the pigment that's found in salmon, the pink color, and especially in wild salmon as opposed to farmed salmon. And then you know so many people you know listening to this podcast take the approach of let the cow eat the grass and the green stuff that has those things in it, and you know those nutrients should then be available within the, you know, within the meat. I know you mentioned eggs, especially for lutein, but getting some of these other plant pigments, but letting the cow do the work for you. I'd love to get your thoughts on that as well.
Speaker 3:So as far as astrazanthin goes, we know that astrazanthin is a very powerful antioxidant. It's, I think, 50 times more powerful than vitamin C. But there hasn't been a lot of research on astrazanthin and the eye. You know, I was listening to Joe McCuller you probably know Joe McCuller Dr Joe McCuller, you might have had him on your show, you might have been a guest on his show and I heard him say that astrazanthin stops macular degeneration dead in its tracks. As far as I know I don't know there's very little studies on astrazanthin in the eye and it may very well be as good as lutein, mesozanthin and zeaxanthin, but there's not a lot of studies in it. There's some studies on maybe reading and dry eye, but as far as decreasing macular degeneration there's really no studies on that. But there's a ton of studies on lutein and we know that if you absorb lutein well and you get it in your serum you can lower your risk of macular degeneration by 79%. Typically, when they did the original studies and they did food studies and it wasn't with meat but they did food studies back in the 90s at Mass General they show that people with the highest diet in lutein, which was mostly with spinach at that time they decreased the risk of macular degeneration by about 43% 44% If it gets in the serum, though it was as high as 77%. Zeaxanthin is as high as 93% decreased the risk of macular degeneration. If it gets in the serum, we're absorbing it good. If we're not absorbing it as good, it's still around the 40% tile.
Speaker 3:Mesozanthin was never studied individually. It's always studied in combination with lutein, zeaxanthin and mesozanthin, because they ride together and mesozanthin is dead center in the middle of the macular. That's why a lot of us eye doctors will recommend a supplement that has the three of them in there, because only about the average American is only getting about 2 milligrams of lutein a day from the vegetables they're eating. Now, what you said about meat it makes sense, but it has never been studied with carnivores, and we could study macular pigment and we know how much macular pigment is in the eye, but we have never studied it. So I can't really give you a good answer, although I do follow a paleo diet and, as you can tell, that's the diet that we do recommend with vegetables.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and, as you mentioned, these things are certainly the zeaxanthin and the lutein, certainly prominent in eggs as well, and so great sources there. You talked about some of these steps that are effective for prevention. Talk about the role that they play in treatment of macular degeneration and what you've seen in terms of ability to stop progression and or reverse macular degeneration, once it's diagnosed, with these interventions.
Speaker 3:So when we see early signs of macular degeneration there was a very famous trial called the AREG trial and when there is these little spots of degeneration in the back of the eye called drusen, and when we start seeing a little bit of drusen, they didn't really study it. But I take a different approach. If I see any breakdown of the tissue in the back of the eye, I'm going to put people on either the supplements usually the supplements, plus my 10-point plan that I went through, plus the diet and the lifestyle change. And if we could catch these people young and we put them on Omega-3s and we put them on D3K2, and we put them on the Lutin, zazanthin, mesozazanthin, and a multivitamin that has the B vitamins goes up there. Homocysteine is high.
Speaker 3:The risk of macular degeneration also goes up, just like Alzheimer's and cardiovascular disease is a risk factor. So if we could slow that, if we could do that, I've seen in clinical practice and the studies show that we could lower the risk anywhere between 40 and 93% of progression. Now, once they progress, they either go to blindness. Where they lose blindness is in stone blind. Where it's like this, they lose their central vision. So once we go to loss of central vision. It's either a dry form, called geographic atrophy, or the wet form, where they have to start getting these anti-vegif injections.
Speaker 3:And I think that's an interesting because what it does? The anti-vegif injections decrease the new blood vessels that are grown so they don't leak. But what does it do and this is something that I think about and a question for you even what does it do to the blood vessels in the heart? Because somebody who needs those collateral in the heart? Are we injecting the eye? Are we shrinking the collateral in the heart? Can we be hurting the heart because we need the collateral in the heart if somebody needs a bypass or had an event, as opposed to where we're doing the opposite? Now, as we know, most people with macular general, many people with macular general, also have cardiovascular problems. So are we buying time by fixing the eye but we're losing time on lifespan? And I don't think that's a question that's really been answered, but it's something that I think about.
Speaker 1:Now if I understand Chris Kenobi's work and the chances that I understand it frankly are low, but I'm going to get real simple here it appears that he thinks that macular degeneration can actually be reversed.
Speaker 3:What he's saying is that he's saying that the main cause of macular degeneration is processed foods. The biggest culprit of the processed foods is seed oils or vegetable oils. If you are on the process, in that process macular degeneration you don't wake up one day and you have cancer. Cancer is developed over years in your body, maybe 20 years. You don't wake up one day and have blind from macular degeneration. Once you're blind from macular degeneration, you watch your central vision. That's when you need heroic measures such as anti-vegeta of eye injections he's talking about on the spectrum, as somebody has to prevent them from giving central blindness with either dry or wet macular degeneration, changing the diet and lifestyle, like I'm speaking about.
Speaker 1:All right, I'm not sure you answered the question. Is it reversible If it started?
Speaker 3:Let me. If you're bleeding and you've gone blind from macular degeneration, it is not reversible. The only time it is reversible, or not really reversible but preventable, is if you catch it before the person has gone blind central blindness and changing the diet and the lifestyle, like I was telling you with my 10-point plan, that's not going to work. When someone's already blind that we want to prevent them from going blind, which could take 20 years for that to happen, so we can, I'm sorry, go ahead Phil.
Speaker 2:I was just going to say so. We can certainly stop progression if it's diagnosed early. The good news is that this can be detected early with a good eye exam.
Speaker 3:Exactly so. We have technology now that we could, like I said, we could see eight microns, 10 microns, 12 microns in the back of the eye. So people out of early signs of macular degeneration, we could stop it, slow it down, reversing it I'm not 100% sure. I mean there's been some cases that they show that drusen has gone away. But let's just say that we could at least stop it or prevent it from progressing progressing up to 93% depending on your lifestyle and how well you absorb zeaxanthin, lutein and mesozeaxanthin.
Speaker 1:All right, Is that better? I think so. It's just fascinating because literally just in the last couple of months I've run into a couple of people I literally never heard of this before. And then all of a sudden I'm running into people who are talking about oh, I was diagnosed with macular degeneration at various stages.
Speaker 3:Your friends are getting older.
Speaker 1:Maybe, so Maybe that's what it is. And then we got to talk to Chris Kenobi and one thing's led to another, so I've really started to pay attention. What is this? It's a work, so I wanted to ask you I'm going to ask a really stupid question that I've never really. I've fought this for years and never asked it what's the difference between an ophthalmologist and an optometrist?
Speaker 3:I'm glad you asked that question. Is the same difference from a cardiologist to a cardiothoracic surgeon, or primary care, the secondary and tertiary care?
Speaker 1:Which one's the primary?
Speaker 3:Optometrist.
Speaker 1:Okay, all right. Now the I don't even know if you're going to have an answer to this question. My wife is a body worker. She has been doing primarily therapeutic massage for 30-some years and, because that tends to be an alternative form of healthcare, she's been able to study a bunch of different modalities, both healing and diagnostic. One of the stories she likes to tell is she was studying urodology reading the eye, using the eye as a diagnostic tool and she has a really interesting story about a friend who'd been diagnosed with some kind of degenerative disease. The woman teaching the eridology course looked at her and said you don't have X, you got Y. And they went back and checked and, sure enough, the reading was right. Talk about eridology, if you can, or, more specifically, the idea of doing diagnosis throughout the body based on what you see in the eye.
Speaker 3:So I mean, eridology isn't something that I practice and that I know much about, other than the fact that the different parts of the eye, including the iris, if you have certain diseases, those diseases could affect the iris. So if somebody had a, has bad diabetes and they had a stroke in the eye which we call a vein occlusion or an artery occlusion in the eye, and they have lack of oxygen, we could see these new blood vessels growing on the iris with a microscope. So, yeah, so things could happen to the iris based on certain conditions, things can happen to different parts of the eye, but as far as eridology goes, that's not something that I practice.
Speaker 1:What kinds of things do you see show up in the eye? What kind of diseases? You've talked about macular degeneration. You've talked about cardiac problems. What other kinds of things can you see?
Speaker 3:So there's close to 300 systemic diseases that could affect the eye. So if we go from the front of the eye to the back of the eye we could see all different signs of different diseases from autoimmune diseases. A lot of autoimmune disease cause dry eye. It could cause inflammation in the eye. We call uveitis or iritis we used to call it in the old days that we call it anterior uveitis or posterior uveitis, which is basically inflammation in the eye that we could see from certain systemic diseases. When we go back to the retina, which is really the capillaries of the eye, we could see many, many diseases there. We could see tumors back there. We could see somebody has certainly diabetes, hypertension, high platelets, high homocysteine, lp, little A. I've seen strokes in the eye because of high LP, little A. Of course we'll see something. It's generic and then we have to work the patient up. So typically if we see bleeding in the eye and we'll see bleeding very early in the eye before they'll have problems the general doctor will see it because the capillaries are so small. The patient will be worked up and it could be a number of different diseases. So there are many diseases we could see in the lens of the eye. If somebody has been on prednisone or certain different medications affect the eye. I know Dr Ovedi uses amiodarone or maybe has used amiodarone. We see that in the cornea of the eye there are different drugs that affect the eye. So the eye is really an amazing, an amazing part of the body. I'll give you a good example of something that we saw once. I had a patient that came in and he had. Now the front of the eye is called the cornea. He had this weird scarring on the cornea. He was a young man, he was in his 40s. It was something I've never seen before, this weird corneal issue. I sent him to the cornea specialist and he's never seen it before. He didn't know what it was as well. It turns out about a year later the man died of liver disease. It was probably related to the liver, the liver disease, not something that we've noticed in the past, but things will show up in the eye that are very strange, very interesting. Like if somebody has breast cancer or prostate cancer, they could have metastasis to the back of the eye. So there are many different things Any type of vascular disease we can see from. We can see different cancers, lymphoma, leukemias. I mean the eye is the window to the health as our technology is getting better which our technology is getting better.
Speaker 3:When I started doing this, I use an ophthalmoscope. Dr Ovedi probably remembers when he went to medical school they gave him an ophthalmoscope. Maybe I could see with an ophthalmoscope 100 microns. At that point, when I saw bleeding in the eye, the person already knew they were diabetic. Now I can see changes, which I did a study on this a number of years ago that was published in Diabetes City in 2016.
Speaker 3:We saw micro-annurisms in the eye. What that showed us is that the person had insulin resistance. We could pick up these little micro-annurisms shows that the person has insulin resistance even before their blood sugar goes up, because it correlated with fasting insulin and two-hour insulin, as we know that before blood sugar goes up, insulin is going to go up. It could be up to 20 years before the blood sugar goes up. Insulin causes. Elevated insulin causes the same problems that elevated sugar does. We could see little micro-annurisms and it's causing these ballooning or little clots in the capillaries in the eye.
Speaker 3:There's a lot of things that we could see in the eye Pretty much. It happens in the eye many times before it happens in the rest of the body Alzheimer's. Now we're seeing changes. Now we're very early with Alzheimer's, but there's a test called oculocloherin tomography, which is basically a biopsy of the retina, the optic nerve and the blood vessels of the eye. We see that the blood vessels start dropping out in a layer called the coroid that correlates with the blood vessels dropping out in the brain. The eye is fascinating. I've been doing this for such a long time and I'm still amazed by the things I see in the eye. It just amazes me. It's really an incredible thing to see, as our technology is getting better, what we could see and diagnose in the eye.
Speaker 2:I've always been impressed by the early stages of these diseases that you can pick up with a good eye exam. Again, recognizing the common root cause that these all share is where the power comes from, because, of course, the changes that you've suggested in terms of dealing with macular degeneration are pretty much in line with what I recommend for preventing heart disease, diabetes, alzheimer's disease, all these things that you've mentioned, in a similar way that I recommend, for instance, coronary artery calcium scans to diagnose these things at early stages. Or we talk about carotid intomolemedial ultrasounds. A good eye exam is going to also give you insight into the status of your blood vessels and therefore risk for all of these diseases. If you don't mind, let's just pivot a little bit to a different eye disease and talk about whether these same relationships apply. Cataracts, of course, are very common and a big source of morbidity and again leading to visual problems for many people. What relationship do you think these same sort of nutritional principles have to the development of cataracts?
Speaker 3:It's very similar. Cataracts is a way of looking at how somebody's aging. When we look at cataracts, if they're getting cataracts young, we know they're aging faster, just like diabetics. They're going to get cataracts about 10 years younger than a non-diabetic. Pretty much everybody's going to get cataracts if they live long enough. It's just when are you going to get it?
Speaker 3:There are things that we could do to lower our risk of cataracts the same 10-point plan that I gave. We know that the green leafy vegetables that have lutein in it zeaxanthin from goji berries or yellow orange peppers we can lower cataracts, depending on what study. If you're absorbing zeaxanthin, you could decrease the risk by about 77%, but most of the studies are somewhere around 30-35% if you're eating these vegetables. Vitamin C also lowers the risk of cataracts. They've done studies with twins 10 years later. The ones that had a diet higher in vitamin C or took vitamin C had a 33% lower risk of getting cataracts. So yes, cataracts is just the same. It's important to know.
Speaker 3:As I mentioned before, there are certain medications, such as systemic steroids, prednisone, which will cause people to get cataracts sooner. Obviously, if you can't breathe and you have to be on prednisone or for whatever reason, you have to be on prednisone. The cataract surgeon could always remove the cataract If you have a prescription. They put a multifocal implant or a bifocal implant in your eye and you see better than before you had the surgery. So there's a lot that could be done, but the short answer to your question is absolutely. We could decrease the risk of cataracts with a healthy diet, and cataracts is a sign of aging.
Speaker 1:Dr Alvedia as a surgeon. A cardiac surgeon is obviously with the work that he's doing to help people stay off his table. He's working against his own best interests as a surgeon and, unsurprisingly, his message has not been warmly received in the entire cardio community. Are you seeing an embrace of your message with the eye doctor community or are folks as resistant to it as the medical professionals seem to?
Speaker 3:be? That's a great question. I think when I first started with the message, I had more resistance. I think especially with optometrists, because we're primary care, we have less resistance. I think you're going to find more resistance in ophthalmology. They're basically just going to go by the book, they're going to use the typical ARADS formula and they're not going to go past that. I'll give you a story. There's a surgeon that I refer a lot of patients to for cataract surgery. He's a very good cataract surgeon in New Jersey, but he's kind of a grouchy kind of character.
Speaker 3:Nothing against surgeons, but some of the surgeons tend to be kind of grouchy. Of course, not Dr Ovedio, but some cataract surgeons and surgeons in general. He's kind of a grouchy character but he's a great surgeon. We overlook his grouchiness and the patients come back and complain to me about him quite a bit that he's not very nice, but he does a great job. I always have to preface I'm going to send you to this guy. He has no personality, but he's the mechanic, he's a really good mechanic.
Speaker 3:So anyway, a good friend of mine, his mother, needed cataract surgery and I sent her to this doctor in New Jersey and she came back to me and she goes. You know, dr Gelb, you should never, ever. The cataract surgery came out great, she did great, she goes. You should never, ever send another patient to him because the whole time when I saw him he was putting you down because of your interest in lifestyle medicine and preventive medicine and nutrition and he put you down the whole time. And you're sending patients to somebody who's bad-mouthing you. So there's a story. So, yes, that is an issue for us, but I think it depends on the doctor.
Speaker 1:Dive a little bit deeper into. You used the acronym ARIDS and I know you were talking about that earlier, but I was still trying to process LUTIN and Z-, z-, z-, z-, z-, z-, z-, z-, z-, z-, z Z-, z-, z-, z-.
Speaker 3:Z Z Z Z Z Z A 2 mg of 2k g of 2k g of Z myself Didn't do that devotees ourselves. It's very much important to see and recognize, but that's not why I recommend it. It's really been very effective and it's terrific, but the early study, the age-related eye disease study.
Speaker 1:Age-related eye disease. Okay, that's what the acronym stands for. That's what it stands for.
Speaker 3:So that's a study in eye care where we show that by using zinc and vitamin C and beta-carotene and vitamin E lower the risk of progression by 25% for wet, nothing for dry macular degeneration. But we've gone much better with the lutein-zazanthin, the omega-3. So it's lutein-zazanthin, meso-zazanthin. So if you want to go and get a product, it's macahealth, then it's omega-3s. We know that decreases risk by 40% of macular degeneration. Vitamin D decreases by 40%, exercise decreases by 40% and if you have high homocysteine.
Speaker 1:Okay, so let me do the math here. So if you take the zinc, the vitamin D and exercise, then it decreases your risk by 120%, right?
Speaker 3:Well, that's separately.
Speaker 1:Oh, okay, but you want to put the odds. I'm a musician, so you know. Yeah, so you want to put the odds in your favor.
Speaker 3:And then the homocysteine is like the B vitamins have shown to decrease progression by about the same 40%, maybe a little less.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:Yeah, very interesting you know, because, as you mentioned, you know homocysteine is certainly related to the risk of cardiovascular disease as well and it's a common well, it's a, you know, unrecognized risk factor in many of the patients that are coming to me with advanced cardiovascular disease. No one's ever checked it on them. I certainly routinely check it with my patients and, as you mentioned, you know, the elevation in it is usually easy to address with supplementation of the right form of folate and B vitamins Important to you know note that it needs to be the methylated form for that and but very interesting to hear the data around eye disease as well.
Speaker 3:And you know, I've seen people with microvascular occlusions, a little strokes in the eye, and the only thing that came out positive is high homocysteine. So we've seen that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, very much. True, Great, why don't we talk a little bit about the movie, the documentary Open your Eyes? Maybe give the background how that came to, came to be.
Speaker 3:So you know I was. We were writing a book. I was writing a book on eye care with a friend of mine who's a cardiologist, jeff Gold, in New Jersey. We're very close friends and I refer a lot of patients for calcium score to hemopathy, something in the eye, and it's amazing how often it comes back positive and so so, and so we were working with an editor and he was a movie producer and says why don't you make a movie? I think you get more impact with a documentary.
Speaker 3:So that's really how the documentary came and we wanted to build awareness that the eye, the eye, is related to systemic disease. I mean, if you ask 10 people or 100 people on the street what does an eye doctor do, they're going to tell you checks for glasses and contacts. They have no idea the relationship between the eye and systemic disease. So we wanted we wanted to educate the public about that. And it was interesting because after the movie this was before, before the pandemic, you know we were showing the movie to the critics and the critics would see the movie and we were talking about retinal imaging and how retinal imaging could pick up different types of different, different types of systemic disease.
Speaker 3:And people would always ask me you know the lay people. The critics would say does my eye doctor do that? Does my eye doctor check to see if I have diabetes? Does? Does my eye doctor have imaging, and how much does it cost? Is that like $1,000?
Speaker 3:I mean, while the average eye doctor charges like $39 for this thing and it's like they were like blown away by it because there's no, the public really doesn't know about this and, as we know that, even studies, you know when studies are done, it takes about 17 years for a study to be used by the average physician in practice. You know so you know you're so way ahead of everybody using calcium score and carotid, imts and all these things that you do in cardiology, where you know the average general practitioner, they're just running the general CBC and the CMP and if they do vitamin D it's a miracle and average this cholesterol and they never fractionated or you never see homocysteine. I mean you never see the things that that you know that you know insulin. We never see fasting insulin to our insulin, things like that. So I mean you know, so you know I'm on the same level as you. Is that I'm just doing it when it comes to the eye.
Speaker 1:So what's been the reception of the movie?
Speaker 3:Oh, the movie. People love the movie. Hopefully you'll get to watch it. I mean it's on Amazon Prime, apple TV, google Movies and shows. I mean people love the movie.
Speaker 1:Everywhere you can get movies, it's available.
Speaker 3:It's everywhere. There's a million over a million dollars into this movie.
Speaker 1:Open your Eyes is the name of the movie.
Speaker 3:Documentary with Dr Kerry Gelp.
Speaker 1:Very good, all right. Well, I'm assuming folks are listening to this and are going to be saying, all right, I want to know more. What's the best way to get ahold of you? So what's the best way for them to find out more? Probably a better question.
Speaker 3:Okay, Well, they can go to my podcast, Dr Kerry Gelp Open your Eyes, the podcast. They could look at my watch. Listen to my health show on AM 1280, the Patriots, Saturday morning at 9 AM Central Time, and then Dr Kerry Gelp at gmailcom.
Speaker 1:Oh, you sure you want to get about an email address.
Speaker 3:Well, they could do the email, or Dr Kerry Gelp, this is a very popular podcast we have here Dr Gelp.
Speaker 1:That's okay, they can take a contact.
Speaker 3:I have people looking for it, so we'll be happy to answer any questions.
Speaker 1:that you're all in Very good, and the movies on the various streaming services. The name of the supplement MACU Health, macu Health, macu Health, all right, very good, all right. Well, phil, I've got information to send to the people I ran into here in the last couple of months. This is good. I'm glad we did this. Any last words for us before we call it a day.
Speaker 2:Excellent discussion and just keep up the great work that you're doing there, kerry, and spreading this word. I think the movie really, first of all, just say, very much worth the watch and very informative. And, like I said, it's just the overlap between all these different disease states and all these different specialties within medicine and how it all really leads us back to the same place Metabolic health, eating real food and so just love that you're getting the message out there and highly recommend everyone go check out the movie.
Speaker 3:Thank you, Dr Ovidian.
Speaker 1:Very good. One last question How'd the softball game go?
Speaker 3:Oh, we lost, but there's always Friday.
Speaker 1:All right For Dr Kerry Gale, but Dr Philip Ovidian Jack Heald. This has been the Stay Off my Operating Table podcast and we'll talk to you all next time.
Speaker 3:Thank you, Bob.