|Articles|February 25, 2016

What you need to know before selling nutraceuticals

Many of your patients are interested in maintaining or improving their vision, but they may walk into your office with wrong information.

The most common misperception is that eating carrots is good for vision, but this is a myth, according to Jeffry D. Gerson, OD, FAAO, Optometry Times Editorial Advisory Board member. He suggests that the optometrist’s role includes educating patients on dietary habits and supplements for which scientific evidence indicates a benefit for overall health or eye health, such as potential value in the prevention or management of a particular eye disease.

The importance of diet

While encouraging optometrists to sell carefully selected nutraceuticals in their practices, he also reminded them that pills are not intended to meet all of an individual’s nutritional requirements.

“Nutritional supplements are just that; they’re something you add that may fill gaps in the diet,” says Dr. Gerson, who is in private practice in Kansas City, KS.

“Healthy eyes belong to healthy people,” he says, and helping patients improve their diets is as essential as recommending supplements.

The sad truth is that the typical American diet consists of far too many packaged and high-fat foods and too few fruits, vegetables, and healthy options such as fish-not the fried menu selections from fast food restaurants. As a result, obesity is becoming an epidemic.

“If current trends continue, 86 percent of the population will be overweight or obese by 2030,” Dr. Gerson says, “and at this rate, 100 percent of the adult population will be affected by 2048.”

Changing peoples’ eating habits is a challenge, and supplements can help make up for the nutrients lacking in the diet, Dr. Gerson says. And certain nutrients, such as lutein, zeaxanthin, vitamin D, and vitamin B12, may have a role in the management of age-related macular degeneration (AMD), diabetes, and diabetic retinopathy.

Internal server error