Slice by slice, the bread is getting harder to see

Growing consumption of highly refined starches such as bread and cereals is being blamed for increasingly widespread short-sightedness.

The link could explain why myopia, in which the eyeball grows too long to focus easily on distant objects, has become more prevalent in the past 200 years in developed countries where processed foods have become staples.

About 40 per cent of New Zealanders have the condition.

Studies of Inuit people in Canada and of Pacific Islanders found that the Inuit, who had adopted Western food, had a rocketing rate of myopia, while Pacific people, who relied on a protein-rich fish diet, did not.

Colorado State University biologist Loren Cordai and Jennie Brand Miller, a nutrition scientist at the University of Sydney, said this could be why 30 per cent of people of European descent now had myopia.

- INDEPENDENT

nzherald.co.nz/health