Guides To Choosing And Understanding Eye Supplements

The last row is the one that matters most and it is the only row whose answer is not a page on this website.

Three things, and each omission is a decision rather than an oversight.

There is no ranking of named competitor products. A retail desk ranking the shelf it competes on is not reading anybody could trust, and the checklist is published instead precisely so a reader can do the ranking themselves with better information than a league table would give them.

There is no recommended daily amount for any ingredient. The trials used particular amounts in particular people and those figures are printed as the trials’ own. Turning them into a recommendation would mean prescribing, which is not what a retail desk does and not what these citations support.

And there is no dietary advice beyond one observation that keeps appearing in the literature: the carotenoids in question come from food, principally dark leafy greens and egg yolk, and people who start with the least in their diet are the ones whose macular pigment moves most on supplementation. That is an observation, not a meal plan.

Thirty sources are cited across this website and both guides draw on the same set. It is worth saying what kind of sources they are, because the mix is deliberate.

Twenty-six are PubMed records: randomised trials, systematic reviews and two Cochrane reviews. Each was found by search and read back through the summary interface in the session these pages were written, so the authors, the journal, the year, the volume and the pages printed here come from the record rather than from memory.

Four are institutional: the National Eye Institute’s own account of AREDS and AREDS2, the NCCIH page on bilberry, and two Institute of Medicine chapters from the Dietary Reference Intakes volume covering vitamin A and zinc. Those last two are the primary source for the adult upper limits that the more familiar fact sheets summarise.

Counted from the citation file that both guides and every product page share. Each page prints only the subset it actually cites.

What is not in that list is as important. There is no industry white paper, no supplement trade publication, no in-vitro study presented as though it were a human result, and no reference to a trial of a finished branded product, because no trial of one exists in this case.

A reader who wants to check any claim on either guide can do it from the reference list at the foot of that guide, which carries only what the page cites rather than the whole set.

AREDS2 reported in 2013 and the shelf has moved since, in three ways worth knowing before reading anything older.

Beta carotene has largely gone. Once AREDS2 showed the formula worked without it and the lung cancer signal in smokers went with it, the reasons to keep it disappeared. A formula still using it in 2026 is following a 2001 recipe.

Zinc amounts have fallen. The original 80 mg was chosen before anyone tested a lower one; AREDS2 found no clear difference at 25 mg, and much of the shelf has moved down accordingly. Copper is still named beside it on formulas that take the interaction seriously.

And the newer half of the category has reoriented around screens rather than around macular degeneration. Bilberry and astaxanthin are on labels because of accommodation and eye fatigue trials, not because of anything in AREDS, and they are aimed at a buyer thirty years younger than the AREDS population.

That third shift is where the marketing has run furthest ahead of the evidence, and it is the reason the blue-light section above is the longest part of the guide.