Reading Fifty Shades of Grey? Protect Your Peepers…

Have you noticed your eyes getting tired or strained because you can’t put down naughty book du jour Fifty Shades of Grey?

Well don’t worry ladies, it has got nothing to do with the excitement of exposing your peepers to ridiculous amounts of crazy, kinky porn. It’s more to do with the fact that you’re holding your book way too close.

Yes, believe it or not, new research has shown that us women folk are unintentionally damaging our eyesight because we tend to hold our books way too close (although when you’re reading a book like Fifty Shades it’s hard not to get up, close and personal to what’s going on between the pages like).

According to boffins from the University of California the fact that women tend to need glasses earlier in life than men was “due to differences in preferred reading distances or arm length as women tend to hold reading materials closer than men do.” Good to know, right?

The researchers were studying a condition known as presbyopia – the loss of near vision that generally occurs to everyone as we age.

Apparently, when we have our nose stuck in a book (literally) our eyeball lens stiffens, which makes zooming in and focussing on close objects far more difficult than is necessary. The result is blurred, weakened vision and a trip to your Optician for a pair of glasses.

“These findings could impact global vision care in multiple ways,” wrote the researchers in the medical journal Investigative Ophthalmology and Visual Science.

“The findings reinforce the need for presbyopia correction programmes for women – a group that often has greater unmet vision needs in developing countries,” they concluded.

So ladies, no matter how much you’re being drawn in by the naughty bits in Fifty Shades it’s probably best if you keep the book away from your face slightly.

We all know the old saying that too much such-and-such makes you go blind, please apply the same logic to reading filthy novels.