How Important is Oil to Our Tears?

Segment 4

The importance of oil.

It’s easy to understand one reason why oil is so important to our tears and why it’s been found that as much as 85% of all Dry Eye can relate to dysfunction of these oil glands. This goes back to the fact that water and oil don’t mix - as oil will always “float” on the surface of water. This creates the “liquid plastic wrap” or sealant effect that keeps the water (and its salts and proteins) locked onto the surface of your eye. The lack of oil causes the evaporation or “evaporative dry eye” we discussed in the earlier segment. As I also mentioned earlier, this is called Meibomian Gland Dysfunction or MGD.

But tear oil serves other important functions.

• It serves as good food for living cells.

• It contains our natural antibodies that inhibit germs from eating the oil.

• It’s a great lubricant, so eyelids freely and easily move over the surface of your eyes.

  To make good oil there are several key things you need to know.

• - First it takes good oil to make good oil -
  - the best building blocks in our diet are the Omega‘s 3, 6 and 9. These oils are found, in different degrees, in foods and supplements containing fish, nuts and seeds. The best fish are small, oily fish like sardines, anchovies, herring and wild caught salmon, as the bigger ones like tuna have eaten many smaller fish which causes them to concentrate the pollutants and toxins like lead, mercury cadmium and PCBs in their oil. Nuts would be tree nuts - not peanuts which are legumes like peas and not true nuts. This would include cashews, almonds, walnuts and pecans. Seeds include flax, chia and hemp, pumpkin and sunflower as well as sesame, caraway and black currant seeds. For most of us this is the diet of 1000’s of years ago, since most of us now eat corn and soy derived meats, as well as processed foods like pizza and pasta. These Carb-rich foods can facilitate the inflammatory pathways akin to putting gasoline on a fire and scientists point out that in the last 100 years we Americans now eat 95 times less of these good oils - even as we use our eyes so many times more than we did in our grandparents times.

• Second, oil glands are little accordion-like structures in our eyelids and only work when squeezed– so it takes good blinks to make good oils. This may sound a bit crazy, but watch a child as they interact with digital devices and you can quickly understand why the average age of onset of Dry Eye suffers appears to be steadily shifting from older to younger people. The problem with this digital era is that it encourages us to stare, which is the act of not blinking. The more staring the less blinking and when you finally blink, instead of big strong blinks, we are prone to fast, weaker blinks - so we don’t miss anything! Cell phones, computers, notepads, TV, games - even driving and reading can all teach us poor blink habits. Thinking of the cow’s udder - if we milk a cow regularly it keeps giving good milk but stop milking it and that udder dries up. That is what’s happening to our glands too!!