We have been getting feedback from customers who say they are seeing improvements in their eyes since taking raw liver. At first this seems bizarre but the more we learn about eye physiology and how the eyes processes light it actually makes perfect sense.

Increasing numbers of people are suffering with poor eye health with symptoms ranging from night-blindness to sun sensitivity and dry eyes. There is a common cause to many of these symptoms which is Vitamin A deficiency. As people eat less protein in the world, and especially animal protein, eye health problems with Vit A deficiency are becoming more prevalent.

A few Vit A facts:

• Vit A is not produced by our body and once supplies run low, we need to take it from the diet.
• Stored largely in the liver.
• The richest sources of Vit A are the livers of animals such as ox, pig, lamb and cod.

In the eyes Vit A is in all cell membranes and involved in all signalling cascades when light is received into the eye. As well as in cell structure Vit A is involved in regenerating eye receptors, rhodopsin, in the retina. Rhodopsin converts light signals into electrical activity in the brain that enables sight.

However, rhodopsin is limited in supply and once stimulated, it takes time to recover. Think of when you wake up to use the bathroom at night and you can find your way there in the dark, but after you have used the light in the bathroom it is very difficult to see your way back to bed in the dark because your rhodopsin hasn’t recovered. Vit A is deeply involved in the regeneration of rhodopsin.

The form of Vit A in animal liver, retinol, is also very different from the form of Vit A in vegetables such as beta-carotene. Beta-carotene needs converting to retinol before the body can make use of it, and many people don’t do this conversion very well.

So, what can you do? We know eating raw liver is not for everyone. That is why we started producing capsules of raw ox liver, without its aftertaste or actually chewing it.

As ever in science, we are still playing catch up with our ancestors as the Egyptians used to prescribe animal liver for eye health thousands of years ago. Maybe we should take a leaf from their book and make it an important part of our diet again.

*A side note…The part of the eye that contains Vit A is called retina, when the active form of Vit A is called retinol. Isn’t that interesting!