154 Achieving pH Balance to Treat Specific Ailments
The loss of his right eye didn’t hold Frank back. Leaving the army a
year after the accident, he received a B.A. in classical languages (Latin
and Greek) and got a job teaching at a community college. There was
just one downside to the loss of vision in one eye: He could no longer
play tennis or Ping-Pong because depth perception is dependent on the
blending of two separate images. He had lost the three-dimensional
vision necessary for judging the distance between himself and the ball.
Frank’s wife, Lorraine, worried that his good eye, doing the work of
two eyes for more than forty years, had come under too much strain,
and she urged Frank without success to take antioxidant vitamins. (The
National Eye Institute and the Chinese Academy of Medicine in Bei-
jing showed that in subjects between the ages of fort y-fi ve and seventy-
four who took antioxidant vitamins the incidence of cataracts was
reduced by 43 percent.^1 ) Shortly after Frank celebrated his sixty-fi fth
birthday he began complaining that the red walls in the living room
were so bright they hurt his eyes—although it was he who had insisted
on painting the walls red. Now he wanted to repaint the walls blue, a
color he had never liked.
When eyes become sensitive to a bright color, it is usually because
particles have infi ltrated the lens or cornea. The particles in the lens
give the images a yellowish tint, and this changes the perception of
colors. The colors with longer wavelengths such as red, orange, and
yellow become too luminous, while those with shorter wavelengths
such as blue and violet are by contrast restful. Although Frank didn’t
have the more common symptoms of a cataract such as seeing halos
around images, fogginess, or loss of vision, the fact that he felt differ-
ently about colors meant that he was seeing them differently because
his lens or cornea had become indistinct. The doctor examined his eye
and found that in fact his lens was opaque in spots, a sign that a cataract
was beginning to form.How Cataracts Develop
The lens is a series of transparent layers of epithelial (skin) cells com-
posed of approximately 60 percent water and 40 percent soluble materi-
als, mostly protein. A lens develops a cataract for the same reason that
arteries harden and bones become encrusted with calcium deposits: it
has been injured by acidic waste. Calcium bonds with the waste to pre-