Whether it’s in the morning eating toast, at work on my lunch break, or at night, when I’m unable to sleep and I spoon peanut butter from the jar like the disgusting mouth breather I am, you can guarantee I’ll be hypnotized by what some 17-year-old who still lives at home and is studying for her college entrance exams has consumed that day. I spend too much time watching YouTube videos about vegan food. Like, every fucking day.
It was only a matter of time, then, before I stumbled across a dark secret. The holy grail of HCLF (High Carb Low Fat) and raw veganism: the fabled full eye color change.
Videos by VICE
The queen of this phenomenon is Fully Raw Kristina. Her video in which she explains how her eyes changed from brown to blue-green on a raw vegan diet has over 2 million views. She went to an iridologist, who explained that each part of your body and organs is reflected in your eye. It’s like reflexology, where your body is mapped out on your foot, but with your eye. Using iridology, you can see if there are internal problems.
If you’re immediately thinking that this strain of science sounds like bullshit, then let me share with you this video I found in a late night peanut butter wormhole, featuring elderly man Dr. Robert Morse, a revered natural doctor and iridologist, pointing at a little fleck on a picture of a woman’s eye with a laser pen and talking about what it says about her uterus, suggesting she “get in there” and strengthen the vaginal wall. Yeah. This stuff gets deep.
Anyway, young pre-raw Kristina was only going to the bathroom once a week and was very constipated, eating a poor, high-fat diet. She says her iridologist told her: If her colon was all bunged up with toxins and other shit, that gunk was literally reflected in her eyes. After turning raw vegan: Boom! Gone was the clogging and the nastiness, and magically, her eyes became blue. Already this sounds a bit dodgy. Quackery alarm bells will no doubt start ringing for the cynical when she starts talking about seeing the soul through the eyes and raw food cleansing the soul, yadda yadda.
Kristina before
Kristina after. Crazy, hey!?
As odd as this is, she’s not the only one talking about it. There are forums on most HCLF blogs about it and a few videos of vloggers discussing changes to their eye color with FAQs—what to expect and what not to expect. It’s almost aspirational: a prize for those who commit their time and money into the extreme lifestyle. Physical, visible confirmation—besides the usual emphasis on weight loss—that what they are doing must be the good and right way to live life. There’s definitely something problematic somewhere deep in there about how blue or light eyes are used to signify a clean “pure” body, while people of color question whether it can happen for them in comment sections.
ANYWAY. Let’s get down to it. Is it a truckload of horse shit? A thorough Google search will tell you there is little proof that raw fruit and veg can change the color of your eyes. In fact, there’s no evidence that suggests a change of eye color can ever be a good thing, but there is evidence that it can indicate something bad: Horner’s syndrome and pigment dispersion syndrome, for example.
All five iridologists I asked said the idea sounded weird. Yorkshire-based iridologist John Andrews said: “Alas, it is a misconception that eyes change color with diet. It is a scientific impossibility.” Yvonne Davis, an iridologist from London, was similarly skeptical but explained how the color change could potentially have happened. “Most iridologists believe the color of your eyes really can’t and doesn’t change that much. By the late teens to early 20s, your eyes are how they will last until you die. But until that point, they’re still changing; depending on your age, it might just be this, rather than anything to do with your diet.
“Sometimes when people are older, in their 40s and 50s, if they’ve had a toxic lifestyle and then go total detox—we’re talking for at least a year—their eyes might appear lighter. When you get older, you also might get some more pigmentation in them.” I showed her the video of Fully Raw Kristina for reference. “If someone does detox or eats vegan, some colors and signs in your eyes can change—slightly. But it’s very, very rare for eyes to go from brown to blue-hazel like this. I find it highly suspect.”
Someone who disagrees vehemently with these eye experts, though, is Ondrej Matej, a vegan dietician and personal trainer. “Absolutely, diet can change your eye color. That’s been known for a little while.” He explained that his eyes had in fact changed on raw food. “They went from a very dark brown to a light brown with very slight green circle around it. You can tell eyes get lighter depending on what you eat.” He started talking about iridology stuff, too. “You have little dots in your eyes, and each one is connected to organs in your body. They show the health of your organs. Healthy means clearer.”
If this is legit, then should people—mostly girls, it should be said—talking about it online expect this physical change? “It’s not like one day they’re brown, then they’re blue. It’s a process that takes years,” he said. Pushed harder, he admitted that not everyone would see the change. “It’ll be down to genetics as well. It’s a very difficult subject. It’s not something that’d happen every time, and it might just be your eyes will become more open and clear.”
Ondrej believes that people might be noticing this now because raw veganism or HCLF is a recent trend. Additionally, it takes a long time to see these results, so if it was real—as he insists it is—we would only really be finding out about it now. “People might not believe it now, but this could be something that might be recurring a lot more in the future.” More and more people are going veggie or vegan and Rawtil4 and HCLF is attracting plenty of people for health or weight loss reasons. But the bottom line is: No one really seems to know if it’s bollocks or not—although my bullshitometer is firmly swinging toward the iridologists’ hot take on this one. Until a future where each one of us is gnawing on 20 bananas for breakfast and spiraled courgettes for lunch, maybe we will never know the truth.
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