79. Get Rid of Your Glasses with Jake Steiner

Jake Steiner 0:03

What the class has do is they move the light for the back in your eye so they compensate for the muscle spasm while not fixing it.

Dr. Stephanie Gray 0:12

Welcome to the your longevity blueprint podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Stephanie gray. My number one goal with the show is to help you discover your personalized plan to build your dream health and live a longer, happier, truly healthier life. Today you're going to hear from Jake Steiner, who will dive into how we escape the vicious cycle of optometry prescriptions. Let's get rolling. Welcome to another episode of The your longevity blueprint Podcast. Today my guest is Jake Steiner Who is it semi retired stock trader and investor. His personal passion is understanding human eyesight and has spent the last 20 years in vision biology, science, exploring nearsightedness prevention and reversal methods. Jay Coase, the web's largest division improvement community with many 10s of 1000s of participants and has written over 1200 articles on vision, biology and myopia control. Welcome to the show, Jake.

Jake Steiner 1:06

Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

Dr. Stephanie Gray 1:08

Well, tell us your story. It sounds like it's a little bit interesting. So how did you become a stock trader turned division expert, and why? And how has human eyesight fascinated you?

Jake Steiner 1:16

So the story is starts out not very exciting. I was an analyst, basically, I was looking at what happens in the stock market and how to make money. And I got lucky. During a time where these things were going crazy, made lots of money had lots of free time, and I try sight minus five diopters. If I put my glasses down, I would never find them again. At one point, I went to the optometrist, and they said, I need stronger glasses again, somewhere in my earlier part of my 20s. And the stronger your glasses are, the smaller your eyes look behind them. So I had these little tiny PGIs behind my glasses. And it was a vanity thing was just like, why is this happening?

And they said, it's genetic. And my background is, as an analyst is understanding what people are telling you to a more specific extent than most people sometimes. And I'm like, it's unlikely to be genetic. And the more I start asking questions, the less I was getting credible answers. So this was kind of before Google was all handy. So I went to libraries did research found out what actually causes nearsightedness, which is well established in clinical science. And then I started digging for solutions. And that's a 20 year journey that brings us to where I'm not wearing glasses, and lots of other people don't either.

Dr. Stephanie Gray 2:24

So this may sound silly, because I don't really know exactly what stock traders do. But like in the movies, they're in front of all these computer screens, right? They're like looking at all these graphs and numbers. So do you feel like the job you had at that time contributed to your poor vision and maybe we'll get to that?

Jake Steiner 2:38

For sure. Most of what causes nearsightedness is extended close up focus so staring at a close point for many hours at a time is the starting point. Google Scholar is a great reference that maybe we mentioned later, but what started for me is schoolwork, you know, books and homework and reading all those things.

Dr. Stephanie Gray 2:58

Let's define nearsightedness. So what what is nearsightedness, which is your, your expertise, and let's talk about how our eyes actually work.

Jake Steiner 3:06

So nearsightedness is kind of counterintuitive, when you can see clearly far away farsightedness being the opposite opposites that you can see clearly up close nearsightedness, or depending where you live short sightedness or myopia is the clinical term for it. If you take off your glasses, you can see far away then you're near sighted.

Dr. Stephanie Gray 3:24

That's me. Yeah, that's me. Well, that's probably many of the listeners. Yeah. It's interesting. I told you before we started this topic, or this conversation that I don't know a lot about this topic. I mean, we just don't learn a lot about it in school. I'm sure after listening to the first five minutes of this, that my schooling also had contributed to my nearsightedness because I was always you know, looking in the books concentrating on the computer, whatnot. I'm sure that that contributed as well. So let's stay on this topic here. So how do our eyes work?

Jake Steiner 3:51

The really short explanation is turns into a big rabbit hole. So I'm just going to keep it on that light part. scholar.google.com By the way, I highly recommend because some of what we talk about makes people go Is this some kind of weird conspiracy, and it's not it's really handy to go scholar google.com to look for good clinical peer reviewed research that solidifies a lot of this nearsightedness shortsightedness starts out as something called pseudo myopia pseudo meaning it's not real. But that's one key word to use or near induced transient myopia near induced meaning caused by near stuff. Transient meaning temporary. So the beginning of it is you have a circular muscle and your eye called the ciliary that tenses up.

When you look at things up close, it shapes the lens in the front of your eye to focus the light on the retina in the back of your eye and close up vision that lens is bulging basically, and the muscle around it is tight. And what happens is, as nature intended, you would not be doing this for very extended periods of time that muscle wouldn't be tight. A lot, right? There would be periods of further distance vision that muscle would always be in motion as you're looking at different things at different distances. But in modern life, you're looking at a fixed point up close, muscles tight. And what pseudo myopia is basically, is that muscle spasms, so you spent six hours staring at books or screen. And now you look far away and your eyes didn't go bad. It's just a muscle stuck. It's a muscle spasm. That's the beginning of nearsightedness for most people.

And then treatment direction of glasses is taking things a little bit in the wrong direction from there, eventually, that muscle would relax, and your distance vision would return but because your parents freaked out, and they sent you to the optometrist, the optometrist taught in school to say, okay, nearsightedness is a genetic thing, or whatever mysterious cause and to give you classes, and what classes do is, the muscle has your eyes and close up mode perfectly healthy, I just stuck in close up. And that means the light is focused for cost efficient. Now, when you look at a distance, light is not focused, what the class has do is they move the light for the back in your eyes, so they compensate for the muscle spasm, while not fixing it. So the muscle stuck in close up, the lenses move the light for the back.

So now you have clear distance vision again, immediately. The problem with this is we never addressed the muscle stock, right. And now, the second thing that happens is, it's kind of a deal with a devil because most people that get glasses get stronger glasses later, the glasses do another thing. And that's called lens induced myopia, I really recommend looking it up, there's 10s of 1000s of search results of just clinical peer reviewed science saying that glasses cause myopia to progress. That basically what happens is, the glasses are made for distance vision, basically, that they move the light for the back in your eye.

And something that happens without going too deep. It's called hyperopic defocus, where a little bit of the light focus is behind the retina because of the glasses. And your eyeball has a mechanism built into it to adjust its length. Because it's a fluid football, it's never perfect. It has this mechanism that's in it that works through whole lifetime that adjust its length for clear vision everywhere. And other lenses move the light a little bit further back in your eye, and that signals for your eye to elongate. And that's how your eyesight gets quote unquote worse because now the glasses give the eyes that signal to elongate your elongates. Next year, you'll go back to the optometrist, you need stronger glasses, because your eye has adjusted to the glasses. And that's a cycle that repeats itself. For that there's some genetic ingredients, basically. But basically, the short version is you wear glasses, you're going to need more glasses up to a certain point. And now you're in this thing that was a muscle spasm, that now is a condition that you're stuck with.

Dr. Stephanie Gray 7:27

And that was me year after year after year, my prescriptions got worse and worse and worse. I remember being in grad school. I remember being in grad school and one of my friends and colleagues who have another ethnicity, she said when my culture, you know, we tell the eye doctor, we don't want stronger power. We want to work our eyes. And I kind of thought well, that would make not that I totally understood what she was saying. But I thought that kind of makes sense. So then when I went back to my doctor that year, I said no, hang on here. Because you know, he always he's flipping between the I guess your next prescription saying, okay, is this better? The same or worse? And usually, a lot of times there was not that much difference. And I don't know if he was just upping my power or whatnot on my prescription. But I said, Don't do not up my power. Can you keep me at the lowest power that I can see? And he said most people don't ask me that. But yeah, I can do that. And so

Jake Steiner 8:14

sure. And the main thing that happens if when you got your first pair of glasses, they weren't not that strong. Had you'd always taken them off and you don't need them basically for reading and close up, your eyesight would have not gotten worse, most likely. Because that hyperopic the focus that light focusing behind i happens mostly when you wear those glasses to in concert vision. So if you're not just taking them off when you don't need them. I said when I've gotten worse and have all my own little podcast where you only talk to people who improved eyesight. And it's a common story that people had this inclination, just always take them off. They stayed really low with the doctors and interesting first thing. They tell you the opposite. They tell you to always wear them and it it doesn't make sense because the the academia side of optometry and ophthalmology understands this. But the retail sales side does not. So it's kind of a curious divide, where I'm quoting a lot of the science written by the same people, but the academics not the people that saw your class.

Dr. Stephanie Gray 9:14

Yeah. So why is it that my doctorate has because I was always interested in Lasik eye surgery, which I'll have to ask your opinion on that maybe you should never have your eyeballs lasered or cut on whatnot. But my doctor said your vision has to stabilize before you would ever be a candidate. And they say usually that happens in your 20s. So is that what you're kind of saying your vision typically kind of gets worse up until a certain point and then it kind of you know, with the glasses, your vision continues to get worse until a certain point and then do things kind of stabilize? But there's

Jake Steiner 9:41

a point of equilibrium for most people, luckily, right? Well, you just reach a point where I said doesn't get worse, not for everybody. Some Asian populations tend to have really high myopia for some people that that stuff just progress is still there. It's minus 20 diopters, but I will just continues elongating for a lot of people. Luckily, that's not the case. So depending on various factors, it stops somewhere. The LASIK guy is correct, because all LASIK does it's not a cure fix, it just cuts a permanent lens into the front of your eye. It's no different than way a contact lens, basically. So if your eyesight is still progressively getting worse, the LASIK will only work for whatever a year or two or three as your eyesight was, was to. So they're waiting for the time that yes, it's not getting any worse than do LASIK usually works out the problem with LASIK is I always say Google Dr. Morris Waxler. He was the guy, the head of the FDA research group that got LASIK approved. He's the main guy that got LASIK, stamped by the FDA, if you just Google him, and his opinion is more telling, I think, than anything else. I mean, he says biggest regret of his life should have never done it. And he's very actively campaigning, trying to get this reversed, which of course will never happen. But that's the main guy like that's the guy who had all the data who says I was wrong.

Dr. Stephanie Gray 10:58

I have more questions here. But let me go back to even starting with the eyesight of my little two year old, right. So he rarely gets screentime. But when he has screentime, he wants it right in front of his face. Like he wants to be right in front of the TV. Tell me how that is bad.

Jake Steiner 11:12

So the I have a five year old now. And one of the first words that he learned was scooch. Back. He didn't know anything else yet. And it was still tiny and yeah, yeah. So important. That muscle right? The closer something is, the tighter that muscle gets, the further the distance of the screen is, the more relaxed the muscle is. So distance is the number one key to avoid the muscle spasm and the later possible development of myopia. So with my kid, the thing was always we traveled a lot. Sometimes we didn't have TV, we just had an iPad, we put it on one end of the bed and keep him on the other end of the bed where he was challenging his eyes to see. And he got used to it and it's fine. And his vision is fine. But he was never allowed to hold the phone never allowed to hold the iPad, the distance is always enforced.

Dr. Stephanie Gray 11:56

So distance is on your side. That's good. Okay. So let's go back to more adults here, right? Because I want to know if there's hope for people like me, so. So how do we escape? What's the solution here? So more individuals like many of the listeners and myself who have been in this just vicious this cycle of up in a prescription up in that prescription up in that prescription? How do we stop this cycle.

Jake Steiner 12:18

So I'm gonna, I'm just gonna say I usually don't use the word prescription because I'm not a doctor for one. And also I'll share shared millions of dollars in lobbying created this prescription rule because lenses all sale are two to $5. On average. The reason their prescriptions is because they're protecting a profit margins, right in lots of countries and places you can buy glasses over the counter. 10 bucks, right like there, it's $100 billion a year industry. Just a side note. So fixing it is super simple. And this is why when we talked earlier, I'm like I don't really have stuff for sale. Because the fix is super simple. It's basically where less strong glasses and your eyes will readjust themselves. It takes about a year for the adopter. And on average people every three to four months, they can do a quote adopter reduction.

There are few more details like you want to wear weaker glasses for your screentime computer use to not straining your eye with this muscle getting so tight. And then for your distance vision, you just reduce your glasses, a tiny bit, just a quarter diopter to everything is more or less the same as it was before. But some things some small print. If you watch movies with subtitles in a dark room, you'll have to challenge yourself a little bit more to read them. That ongoing very light, very light bit of challenge. In most people works for three to four months, that's an awesome thing a little tiny bit of it is great. It should be almost unnoticeable. If you're getting headaches or dry eyes or anything like that, you don't want that, but just a tiny reduction, that just adds a tiny little bit of challenge is what you want. Because eyes adjust to may slowly, in three to four months, you'll notice these classes work exactly as my previous classes did three to four months ago. Then you get a quote a doctor lawyer again. And you just keep doing that till you no longer need glasses.

Dr. Stephanie Gray 13:59

Wow. So have you worked with lots of clients who have done this fan? So tell me,

Jake Steiner 14:03

testimonies. 10s of 1000s of people it's okay. It's an individual experience, right? And you have the motivation to do it. And there's, it's the level where I'm saying if you eat less calories, you're going to lose weight, like I'm giving the short version. Basically, it's the premise, right? Like you go to the gym to get stronger. It's super simple to do. And if you have a reason to do it, and once you make the first reduction successfully, It's oddly empowering to go. This is not wrong with me. Right? And then anybody who does that first reduction or for the most part will continue doing it because it's like, hey, I can do this. You can measure me up you're by yourself very easy to do. It's just a distance to blur. You keep the log of eyesight improves. And every year you lose a diopter till you forget about those things and right like I had minus 520 eyesight. I don't own glasses.

Dr. Stephanie Gray 14:50

Wow. Sounds too good to be true. So to me, I keep thinking though, if this comes back to the, to the muscle spasm that we can open the conversation with how do we get the muscles to know spasm because it can't be. Well, I shouldn't say can't it it sounds like it can't be as easy as just Oh, reduce your prescription all along the way. Are there eye exercises? Or is there a time of I rest? Or what other strategies? Do we need to implement them to help? I would think that muscle, relax, right? What's the other piece of this that I'm missing?

Jake Steiner 15:18

Yeah, too good to be true. Just in that I'm saying if you eat less calories, you lose weight, right? Like, that sounds too good to be true. Because we're skipping all the things that I love pizza, what am I going to do, right, like food, addiction, all the things that play into that story. Same is the case here. Like, we have serious screen addiction problems most people do. Getting away from that screen. I always say, you know, like, if you're not getting three hours a day of solid real distance vision time, then it's going to be hard to improve your eyesight because you need distance vision to improve your distance vision. And 10 years ago, this wasn't that big of a deal. But now people like three hours, you know, and I get people looking at me like, What do you do for three hours? Right? Because we are so right, you're at work in front of a screen.

But then in your spare time you go to dinner with friends, people in front of screens in the restaurant, the screen addiction is a huge issue. I had people on I had a couple guys on actually that were surfers recently, they improved eyesight back to 2020 super quickly because they have a hobby, that driving to the surf spot to spending hours sitting in the waves to spend time driving back that what makes it too good to be true is for a lot of people, the adjustment would be you can't spend all your time glued to a screen, you would have to address your problem that you may be not acknowledging with being addicted to that screen. Right? So it's going to be challenging to learn about it and to buy on glasses and kind of wander through this journey. Takes a reason to do it. But it's not that difficult.

Dr. Stephanie Gray 16:43

How long does it take for that? Do we know how long it takes for the eye muscles to relax? So I am on a computer also right? So let's just say I see patients, let's say eight to noon, and basically on my computer looking at my patient or you know, on my computer, but let's say I take a break, theoretically 12 to 1230 go do some meditation close my eyes are the how do I say this? Is that a long enough time to kind of allow those muscles to relax? Do we know how long it takes?

Jake Steiner 17:09

Yeah, good question is printed a chart already a great thing to have anyway, just to have one six meter like the bigger charts are better, you can print it or just buy it off Amazon or whatever, there's three major ones or six meter ones, the bigger distance ones are more accurate. Doesn't matter though, you just hang it up somewhere and figure out what your best distance vision is. So basically, you woke up in the morning or you had a relaxing day went for a hike whatever several times, just keep comparing it, which lines can read, adjust the distance of it, play around with it till you figure out best case scenario, what's the smallest line I can read.

And then after this long patient session that you have, look at the chart again, and notice that you can't see it as clearly as it did before. And then figure out how much time it takes of doing other stuff. Coming back to the chart for that line of cleared up again, that's when that muscle relaxed, it's hard to separate. It's just it's so simple. All of this. This is why once you figure it out, it just makes perfect sense because it's just a muscle spasm and the eyeball shape, right? And you slowly wean yourself off of the glasses, and you work out exactly that's a perfect question of how do I relax my muscle enough to where this is not an issue. And then you experience a much different perspective than being stuck with contact lenses or classes.

Dr. Stephanie Gray 18:24

So when you say you reduced by, like a quarter diopter So are you saying then with both your contacts and your glasses, you're just slowly reducing your prescription?

Jake Steiner 18:33

Right? Exactly. It depends on the person, it depends on when you feel like you make that quote adopter reduction. And you compare, I always say do an eye chart to a distance vision landmark, like you got outside of your house, you see something that's challenging to read across the street nearby, and then that's your, your baseline. And then when you get the new law glasses, you're like, aha, that's blurrier at that distance, challenging point. And then keep comparing it till after a few months, you're like, I can see the street sign as well as I could with my old glasses. And then you reduce it again,

Dr. Stephanie Gray 19:03

say and I think so. Also, how much time should we be spending without the context or without the glasses entirely because I I'll tell you, one of my eyes is negative six, I mean, I'm, you know my prescriptions worse than then you begin, or I guess when you started your journey. So I literally cannot see well at all, when I take my glasses or my contacts off, should I still be spending a lot of time with them off like towards the evening hours.

Jake Steiner 19:25

The one thing you want is a is a lower diopter pair of glasses or contact lenses but glasses ideally for all that close up time. So in general, it's about $1 and a half less than what you need for distance vision to be able to see the screen and things in a relative close up space muscle much more relaxed than if you full power distance glasses all the time. Right? So you put those on when you're not you're not driving, you're not outside, you're not dealing with real distances. You're just like this conversation you and I are having adopted half less would work perfectly and would relax your eyes. You do that for a few months and you cannot wear those two Since classes during close up, like you'll immediately just feel nauseous, over long periods of time your eyes have gotten used to this massive amount of strain.

But once you start weighing the lower doctors for close up, it's gonna be so much nicer, right? And then you reduce those right every three to four months. And then you reduce the distance classes separately from those every three to four months. As you're asking me more questions that it's too good to be true unravels, right, like there's layers of details. It's not that complicated. It's basically really just adjusting how much of this to actually need to see clearly. And then staying on top of that as as your dependence on those diopters reduces over time.

Dr. Stephanie Gray 20:43

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Now let's get back to the show. I ask you another question. And if you don't want to speak to it, we'll just edit this out. But my vision got significantly worse postpartum. I mean, my vision went wonky. And I know there's a hormonal component to vision changes. And so I quickly got a stronger power prescription whatnot, because I was like, Oh my gosh, I can't focus. I can't see what not. And maybe I should have more pushed through that per se. But I feel like that's what kind of got me in a worse conundrum. Do you hear that often? Or for listeners? If this happens to them? Is there anything they can do? I kind of freaked out because I was like I gotta be able to see like, you know, to work and up my prescription went postpartum

Jake Steiner 23:37

go see an ophthalmologist regularly not an optometrist necessarily. People work in a shopping mall. subclass is not my first choice. But go see an ophthalmologist once a year, get a checkups. I'm not a doctor, I can't give medical advice. Make sure that your eyes are well, right. Like there's lots of things can that can affect your eyesight that are other things besides screens and glasses. This is just a very common scenario. Plenty of other things that I'm not speaking towards. hormones affect eyesight, food effects, eyesight, sleep affects eyesight, all kinds of things affect eyesight now that I'm back to normal vision, shocking, like it is just but when you talk to people who have never worn glasses, and you ask them, that happens, right? Like, hormone change, for sure. Like if I were to eat, I don't anymore, luckily. But if I were to eat a pizza and drink a Coke, the insulin spike would just wreck my vision. It just does.

Right? Like if I spent four hours watching Netflix on iPad at this distance screwed, but a lot of people don't or if you never wore glasses, or if you're in this situation where you know better. You just go, my body's telling me that the system is not working as well as it should. There's stuff going on, right? And eyesight is one of the things that gives you that indication of an upgrade, right and adjusting that with the so called prescriptions. It will work immediately. But now you're stuck with those things and you're gonna have to work your way back. So in a lot of cases It is ideal to go, oh, what can I do about this, maybe I need to cut back on screen time, maybe I need to meditate. Maybe I need to take time to look at distances and slowly be closer to a thing outside, right and experience and step a little bit further back and just give yourself a few weeks or months, whatever time it takes for everything to return back to normal. Not so quickly reaching for the glasses unless it's driving or safety or other reasons.

Dr. Stephanie Gray 25:26

Sure, sure. Let's talk about some of those other things that contribute to our vision. So one being nutrition. So are there certain foods you recommend individuals consume or avoid? Or are there certain supplements that are just for eye health, top of your list, things that you take on a daily basis?

Jake Steiner 25:42

So I'm not a nutritionist? We've got a huge forum where people talk about all these things, and I'm very schooled. I'm often schooled on my lack of knowledge and all of this stuff. Generally speaking, diet has a significant effect. For a lot of people insulin spikes are not great, so that the better sorted your diet in general is, the happier it will be. That said you can be obese and reverse your myopia. It totally can. It's not a requirement, but you'll certainly notice the difference look like the insulin spikes, for example, supplements, again, not my area, when people ask me I say blood panels, correct deficiencies, the body's an integrated system, everything works together. If you're missing stuff, it's going to affect your eyesight too. There are definitely supplements that are supposed to help eyesight. The studies are kind of hit or miss in terms of do I need this? And Will my side be negatively affected myopia in particular, question mark. So I don't take supplements specifically for eyesight, but I do get regular blood panels. And sometimes things are not right. And I tried to fix

Dr. Stephanie Gray 26:45

that. Do you want to speak to any other age related vision changes? even speak to like cataracts or glaucoma or dry eyes? Or what other tips do you have? For our listeners?

Jake Steiner 26:55

The interesting thing about myopia is it's not really, there's nothing wrong with your eyes, right? It's a muscle spasm and unhealthy eye adjusting glaucoma. There's a medical condition where I'm not schooled or educated on so I can't comment on. But a super common thing is presbyopia, which is your near vision goes away, you can't see clearly up close anymore. And what happens is the lens in the eye that we're talking about that flexible lens, it's super cool with that soccer muscle around it, that lens hardens with age. So the most is to work harder to shape the lens. So you can see as clearly as close at a certain age, like I'm close to 50. So I'm supposed to be in that age range, where I'm like, reading glasses for a large majority of people that I interact with. And that's a really large group. Nobody needs reading glasses at any age. So I'm not claiming anything here other than you may be able to avoid reading glasses by not wearing reading glasses if you don't really need them.

And practicing better habits like better lighting. When you're reading a book, instead of reading in a dark room, read it next to natural ambient lighting, adjust the distance to it, if you do need reading glasses were the lowest diopters possible. Because the more diopters of reading glasses you wear, the less that muscle has to work, the less the lens is being shaped that more easily that lens hardens, and the more you become dependent on reading glasses, and I'm no expert, right, except that I'm getting old. So I'm seeing it happen on myself. The more we can avoid these dependencies, it seems the more we maintain our ability to use our bodies, the less we are affected by age in a lot of ways. So I always caution people to not reach for the glasses unless they need them. Because once they do, they tend to become dependent on

Dr. Stephanie Gray 28:43

Well tell us about this, you say you have kind of this this forum where individuals can ask questions and whatnot. Tell us about your website. Do you have programs there that help patients or patients or patients help individuals kind of learn how to reduce their diopters are tell us about your website.

Jake Steiner 28:57

So there is a terrifying website called end myopia.org that I've made, and that's been living for many, many years. So there's a bazillion articles on there. We have a big Facebook group, we have a even bigger forum, we've got a terrible YouTube channel with my face on it. We've got all kinds of resources to help people connect with other people on a similar journey. Right? Because it's, like you said, the reactions ranged from it's too good to be true to this can't be true to this is daunting. And it's really nice to just kind of have a little free seven day email guide that walks you through the basic steps. And then join the forum, join the Facebook group, do some reading, think of it as a project, right? Like it's not an article of these five magical steps to fix your eyes. It's more of an exploration of making yourself better. And if you take a month or two, you're definitely going to get to the point where you can you can reduce depending on these things.

Dr. Stephanie Gray 29:49

Very cool. Now on your site do you have Is there a quiz? Like are my eyes broken?

Jake Steiner 29:54

There is experimentally play around with stuff so I'm not an expert on these terrible things of the inner But people ask recurring questions a lot. So I played with this quiz idea. If you take the quiz, which you don't need to doesn't lead, you don't have to sign up with your email anything, it will, based on the diopters that you have, it will show you a lot of other people who had a similar diopter range and stories of how they improved from there. It's a nice, like, if you're at minus six, right now, you take the quiz, you end up on a page that shows you all the people that are not all of them. But a lot of the people that have interacted with it started minus six, whether it's Facebook posts, or whether that's podcast episodes we did with them. So it kind of gives you a nice starting point of, Hey, there's this person, and they started here. And here's what they did. And here's what they're currently so it's nice,

Dr. Stephanie Gray 30:41

very cool. Well, I ask all of my guests what their top longevity tip would be. So what is your absolute top longevity tip?

Jake Steiner 30:48

Stay away from sugar and plenty of sports.

Dr. Stephanie Gray 30:51

Plenty of sports. That's good. I haven't heard that one.

Jake Steiner 30:55

Really, so important. I got into jujitsu a year ago. And I like I said, I'm almost 50 like additional weird things. I couldn't sleep on my left side for many years. Just I could lay on it for a while. But then things would start hurting. And since I've started that, that's all gone. It's just something I realized in the last several weeks. I'm like, I can sleep on my left side. It's amazing. All that movement and challenge and stuff. It's brilliant. I have

Dr. Stephanie Gray 31:20

a handful of patients around your age who are also integrated into jujitsu. I can't even say jujitsu right now. Yeah. It's a workout. It's a big workout. Yeah.

Jake Steiner 31:27

So great. So I'm addicted to it.

Dr. Stephanie Gray 31:29

My brothers do as well. Well, is there anything else that you didn't get a chance to share that you'd like to share with our listeners today?

Jake Steiner 31:36

Maybe I should start with is, you need a reason to want to do it. Right and always have such a wide range. Yeah, yeah, the why of that people don't realize because you pop in the context, you put on the glasses, and you think you'll find contact lenses are a little bit of a deal with the devil corneal thinning happens. If you look that up on Google Scholar, over the course of many years, your cornea tends to start getting thinner. That doesn't seem to reverse. So long term contact lens wearers and so great. If you wear glasses, your social interactions are a little weird, because you're looking through the center of lenses. So your neck versus your eye movement is just off. So people perceive you a little bit strangely.

So you seem socially possibly a little bit more awkward if you compare people with glasses to people without or if people no longer need them, change your posture. Because if you wear glasses, you walk you have to look at the ground because you can't you don't have good peripheral vision. It raises anxiety in people because your peripheral vision is not generally not functioning. So your your brain keeps going. I don't know what's going on here. So there's lots and lots of lots of reasons that not taking care of your vision affects your whole general experience with life worth just digging into what part of your existence is connected to vision that might not be ideal that you could positively affect with this.

Dr. Stephanie Gray 32:51

Very interesting. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show today. And I'm sure sparking lots of curiosity amongst our listeners, thank you for introducing us to just the concept of the muscle spasm because I think many of us didn't even know that's what was happening. I'm really just giving us hope that we can end myopia and we can actually reduce the strength of our glasses that there is hope there and you have a community to prove it. So thank you so much today for coming on the show and sharing with our listeners.

Jake Steiner 33:16

Awesome. Thanks so much for having me appreciate it.

Dr. Stephanie Gray 33:21

Well, that interview did affirm to me that I was right and that I shouldn't continue to increase and increase my scripts year after year, but actually try to lower them. Be sure to check out in myopia.org to see testimonies of those who have successfully done that and connect with Jake, be sure to check out my book your longevity blueprint. And if you aren't much of a reader, you're in luck, you can now take my course online where I walk you through each chapter in the book. Plus for a limited time the course is 50% off, check this offer out at your longevity blueprint.com and click the Course tab. One of the biggest things you can do to support the show and help us reach more listeners is to subscribe to the show. Leave us a rating and review on Apple podcasts or wherever you listen. I do read all the reviews and would truly love to hear your suggestions for show topics guests and for how you're applying what you learn on the show to create your own longevity blueprint. The podcast is produced by the team at counterweight creative as always, thank you so much for listening and remember, wellness is waiting.

The information provided in this podcast is educational. No information provided should be considered to be or used as a substitute for medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Always consult with your personal medical authority.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai