In a world where screens dominate our lives, from work desks to endless social media scrolling, eye health has taken a backseat. Redness, dryness, and fatigue are all-too-familiar problems for many of us. While eye drops and pricey treatments seem like the only solutions, there’s a simpler, more natural remedy—amla. Also known as Indian gooseberry, amla is a winter superfood celebrated not just for boosting immunity but also for enhancing eye health. Nutritionist Dr. Komal Bhadouria from SCI International Hospital, New Delhi, explains, “Amla is a special fruit full of antioxidants that are effective in reducing cell damage, which reduces the free radicals that can cause disease in the body.” Let’s dive into how amla can give your eyes the care they need.
Also Read:How To Make Amla Murraba; 5 Health Benefits Of Having Amla In Winter
Photo: iStock
5 Ways Amla Can Keep Your Eyes Happy and Healthy
1. Packed With Vitamin C – Your Eye’s Natural Ally
Amla is bursting with vitamin C, which is crucial for maintaining eye health. A 2020 study in the journal Nutrients highlights that vitamin C plays a major role in reducing oxygen levels within the eye, preventing oxidative damage. Consultant nutritionist Rupali Datta adds, “Amla’s natural antioxidants protect against free radicals, nourish the body from within, and strengthen the immune system.” So, adding amla to your routine can keep your eyes looking brighter and healthier for years to come.
2. Fights Eye Fatigue
If long hours on screens leave your eyes tired, amla might be your best friend. Thanks to its antioxidants and anti-inflammatory properties, this superfruit helps combat digital eye strain symptoms like dryness, irritation, and blurred vision. It’s like a natural refresh button for your eyes!
3. Supports Better Vision
Dealing with high spectacle power? Amla might help. Rich in vitamin A, it supports retinal health, which can improve both day and night vision. Regular consumption could make it easier to see in dim lighting and may even help reduce the severity of night blindness caused by vitamin A deficiency.
4. Helps Prevent Eye Infections
Eye infections like conjunctivitis are annoying and painful, but amla’s antibacterial and anti-inflammatory properties can help. Whether you consume amla juice or use amla-based eye drops, it can soothe irritation, reduce redness, and protect your eyes from common infections.
5. Slows Down Age-Related Vision Problems
As we grow older, vision problems like macular degeneration can creep in. According to a research paper published in the Open-Access Impact Journal on Aging, amla’s high vitamin C content and powerful antioxidants, including polyphenols, can help fight the free radicals responsible for age-related eye damage. Including amla in your diet may just keep your eyes sharp as you age.
Photo: iStock
Easy Ways To Add Amla To Your Diet
1. Juice It: Blend fresh amla juice with a dash of honey or dilute it with water for a refreshing drink.
2. Powder It: Add amla powder to smoothies, warm water, or herbal teas to sneak in a quick nutrition boost.
3. Snack On It: Dried amla with black salt is a tangy, on-the-go treat your taste buds will love.
4. Pickle It: Amla pickles are a delicious way to add a zesty twist to your meals while reaping its benefits.
Also Read: 5 Fun Ways To Include Amla In Your Daily Diet For Strong Immunity
Take care of your eyes the natural way with this winter superfood — your screen-tired eyes will thank you!
Disclaimer: This content including advice provides generic information only. It is in no way a substitute for qualified medical opinion. Always consult a specialist or your doctor for more information. NDTV does not claim responsibility for this information.
When you think of turkey, you might picture festive meals and holiday feasts. But guess what? It’s way more than just a special occasion dish! Turkey is packed with high-quality protein, vitamins, and minerals, making it a nutritious superstar you can enjoy all year long. Whether you’re all about building muscle, keeping a healthy weight, or just trying to eat better, turkey is your go-to choice. Let’s dive into why turkey should be a staple in your meal rotation. “These meats not only bring an exciting new flavour to your celebrations but are also packed with health benefits that make them a perfect fit for indulgence without the guilt,” says Devna Khanna, In-Country Marketing Representative, USA Poultry & Egg Export Council.
Here Are 7 Surprising Health Benefits Of Turkey You Need To Know:
Turkey is a fantastic source of lean protein, making it a top pick for enjoying rich meals without the high-fat guilt. Here’s why turkey deserves space on your plate.
Especially the breast meat! It’s low in saturated fat, making it a heart-healthy choice that won’t wreck your balanced diet during the festive season. You get a solid 25 grams of protein per 100 grams while keeping calories in check. Also Read: How To Make Roasted Turkey Recipe
Need to repair those muscles? Turkey’s got you covered! A single serving delivers a hefty dose of protein, keeping you full longer and cutting down on those post-meal snack cravings.
Turkey is loaded with vitamins and minerals like B vitamins (shoutout to B6 and B12!), which help boost energy, support brain function, and keep your red blood cells healthy. Plus, it’s a great source of zinc for a strong immune system and selenium, an antioxidant that fights off cell damage.
Supports Muscle Growth and Recovery
Fitness fans, rejoice! Turkey’s high-quality protein is perfect for muscle repair and growth after those killer workouts. Its amino acid profile is spot on for promoting muscle health.
Want to keep your heart happy? Turkey is lower in cholesterol than red meats like beef or lamb. Choosing turkey can help keep your cholesterol levels in check, lowering your risk of heart problems.
This essential mineral is a must for immune function, wound healing, and keeping your skin healthy. Turkey gives you a good boost of zinc to help your body fight off infections and stay strong.
Also Read: How To Make Nilgiri Turkey Korma Recipe
Believe it or not, turkey can even give your mood a little lift! It contains tryptophan, an amino acid your body uses to create serotonin, the happy hormone. While you won’t instantly feel euphoric after turkey, regularly munching on tryptophan-rich foods can definitely contribute to your overall well-being.
Patricia Field, left, and Sex and the City star Kim Cattrall attend the premier for the documentary Happy Clothes: A film About Patricia Field in New York. The close friendship between the two saw fields become involved with the TV show.Jamie McCarthy/AFP/Getty Images
It’s 9 a.m. in New York and costume designer Patricia Field has sifted through nearly 40 racks of clothes for the re-launch of ArtFashion, an incarnation of the concept shop she’s been running since 2018. This a new hybrid gallery/clothing store is slated for a mid-October launch in a larger location than its predecessor across the street.
If you don’t know who Field is, her resume is brimming with accolades. The 83-year-old has styled and defined big and small screen characters of their time: Carrie Bradshaw (Sex and the City), Miranda Priestly (The Devil Wears Prada), Wilhelmina Slater (Ugly Betty) and Emily Cooper (Emily in Paris). She has two Emmy wins, and a BAFTA and Oscar nomination for her costume design work. Now, a new documentary titled Happy Clothes follows the work of the visionary, capturing her process for choosing outfits for TV and film projects.
Patricia Field stands in her shop in New York, on Jan. 27, 2022. The new documentary Happy Clothes follows Fields and captures her process for choosing outfits for TV and film projects.TIMOTHY O’CONNELL/The New York Times News Service
But before her costume design career, Field’s first store, Pants Pub, outgrew its original location and moved to 8th street in the early seventies. It was in the thick of the eighties when her store started to gain rapid momentum, attracting people such as artist Keith Haring and fashion designer Marc Jacobs to work in the retail space. During that same era, she became friends with countless celebrities and culture changers ranging from Diane von Furstenberg to Jean Michel Basquiat.
Her latest expansion comes from the rising demand for items from House of Vintage, Field’s own fashion line from the eighties and beyond (she hired David Dalrymple to design the line). Her success lies in her refusal to offer boring, minimal or muted sensible clothing department stores typically bank on. For someone whose motto is more-is-more and less-is-a-bore, the process of moving to a bigger store is a welcome change. The idea of downsizing outfits and objects for racks and shelves is, in her words, “just painful.”
“I have problems rejecting things that are bright and colorful and busy… I believe patterns and colours and fabrics that people say shouldn’t be matched together can live together in my world,” she says via Zoom from her New York office.
Off-the-cuff moments in Happy Clothes capture her knack for gleeful styling and experimentation during long scenes. In a number of scenes in the film, which will be available in Canada on demand on Oct. 8, Field outfits actress Bresha Webb, who plays Renee Ross in the Starz comedy series Run the World.
The film also follows the rising interest in Field’s work through the years. Today, the Field fixation could be due to her role as consulting costumer in Emily in Paris or the fact that nineties and early 2000s trends are back on runways (from peplums to nude dresses). Field’s sustainable fashion philosophy (mixing previously owned items with new ones) could also be a factor as it is gaining popularity among Gen Zers who aren’t connecting to mall culture and are tired of wearing overly accessible brands.
Field’s brazen tastes have been influential on TV and on the runway, many items worn by characters on Sex and the City – from neoprene and scuba-inspired gear to girdle skirts, Manolo Blahnik heels and the famous Fendi Baguette (what is often referred to as the first “It” bag), the costume designer’s choices spurred luxury and vintage retail sales for years.
However, beyond covering the joy and business of being Field, Happy Clothes slightly touches on the people and communities who inspire her. Another documentary on Field called The Little House That Could from 2013 digs into how she was among the only people in New York to hire what she calls her people (she has identified as a lesbian since opening her first store in 1966 with a former girlfriend): Queer artists, sex workers, drag queens, transexual and transgender people. Art, nightclub and fashion icons such as Amanda Lepore (who said “doing a shift in Pat’s store was the closest thing to working at a nightclub”), Haring (who painted windows), Lady Bunny (who was employed as a live mannequin) and designer Jacobs (who once worked the hat counter).
In addition to being a style icon with her store, Field, left, is a sought-after costume designer whose resume of film and TV projects includes Sex and the City and The Devil Wears Prada.Supplied
This downtown cache attracted Grace Jones, Madonna, Cyndi Lauper and JFK Jr. (who was thrown out for calling salespeople freaks) to the store. “A good representation of LGBTQ people are intelligent, colourful, expressive and fashionable,” Field says. “I’m drawn to people who say something with their clothes and make that a type of free, liberated communication every day.”
The pro chalks up her power to see beyond the brands and expertly execute high/low looks for friends and artists who equally embraced the clash of class and trash, like Haring and Basquiat. “We sold postcards from Jean-Michele for like $10. My loft was right above my shop on 8th Street and they became family. It was a wonderful to have that experience in a place where I would sleep and eat and dream,” she says.
The film’s director, Michael Selditch, says Field’s affection for her eclectic and eccentric downtown crowd helped many people reach the next level of fame. “People didn’t know who Basquiat or Haring were at the time. Obviously things have changed. You can look up those postcards now and find one on Sotheby’s for $20,000,” he says. “Pat was providing these artists and queer people opportunities for people to see their work and learn who they are when nobody else was.”
She calls her proudest moments “life-changing collaborations” and says her close relationship with Canadian actress Kim Cattrall of Sex and the City as rare. “She was willing to get in my car and go to old clothing shops so we could find dresses by Giorgio di Sant’ Angelo,” she says of Cattrall’s keenness to wear the Italian-Argentinian fashion designer whose disco-influenced couture grew to prominence in the seventies and eighties. The pair have remained close, and while she did not return to costume the show’s off-shoot sequel, And Just Like That…, Field did agree to come back to dress Cattrall for her minutes-long cameo at the end of season two.
“Pat’s goal is to see the joy in collaboration” adds Selditch. “The connection Pat has with actors is very different from other costume designers or stylists. Many are prescriptive, they just tell the person, ‘Put this on.’ Pat wants to know what they connect to and feel.”
Author and fashion historian Marcellas Reynolds, whose books Supreme Models, Supreme Actresses and Supreme Sirens recount the impact of stylists and costumers in pop culture, says Field’s work on Sex and the City is part of the progressive development of American style through the years.
Reynolds sees Field as a bridge whose taste leaps from the underground into the mainstream and becomes trend: the epitome of what Samantha Jones once famously said in Sex and The City when trying to explain the evolution of a trend in the nineties: “First come the gays, then the girls, then the industry!”
From the left: Patricia Field, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Cynthia Nixon on the set for Sex and the City 2 in New York.Tina Paul/Supplied
“Patricia is part of the gay, lesbian, trans, Black, Latino, Puerto Rican community – those are her friends and family,” Reynolds says. “She has never been about styling someone head to toe in designer labels. Her goal at her stores was to make something that club kids would want to wear and that visions extends to her costume work.”
Reynolds says Field’s most powerful magic trick is changing her character’s socio-political status with clothing. For example, if Sex and the City’s Carrie, Samantha, Miranda and Charlotte were real, they wouldn’t be at a vogue ball in Harlem. “They wouldn’t know how to act; they’d clutch their pearls and hide in a corner,” says Reynolds. “Patricia made the show more urban by making the wardrobe serve as the fifth member of that quartet. She gave women a gateway into a world of risk with her styling. She allowed them to experiment in a free way that runway fashion doesn’t always encourage. What Sex and the City’s characters wore was the coolest connection to New York’s nightlife and queer life that many women at the time could only wish to have.”
Los Angeles-based actor and former New York night club fixture Pete Zias spent many hours shopping at the 8th Street boutique in the late nineties and early 2000s. Field’s curation helped inspire Teddy Teddy – a viral comedic character he created for both the stage and social media. “Teddy is a legendary nineties club kid, so naturally he loves wearing looks you could easily find in Patricia Field’s store – latex pants, leopard print, polka dots, sequin,” he says.
Zias, who hosts a show called Total Trash Live (which deconstructs and mocks tabloids), is one of many digital creators keeping Field’s street cred alive online. Recently a TikTok from podcaster and stylist Caroline Vazzana went viral, featuring an interview with Field and her longstanding claim that she invented leggings.Meanwhile, a throng of Instagram accounts – including @findingCarriescloset, @carriebradshaws_outfits and @everyoutfitonsatc (also a podcast), post daily and spread the good word on Field’s optimistic yet fringe-inspired fashion. It is something Field herself is pleased with. “The secret to staying and feeling young is surrounding yourself with young, talented people,” she says. “They give me so much energy so I hope I do the same for them.”
Johan Cruyff called the Netherlands’ 2-0 win over Brazil in the second group phase of the 1974 World Cup the truest example of Total Football there had been. Johan Neeskens was knocked out during it, floored by a punch from Brazil’s captain Marinho Peres. That felt typical. Neeskens was always the physical one, a hard, angular midfielder with unnervingly blue eyes. Sublimely skilled as that Dutch side were, they were also more than capable of looking after themselves and when it came to mixing it there was no one better than Neeskens.
But Neeskens also scored the Dutch opener in that game, receiving the ball halfway inside the Brazil half, pushing the ball to Cruyff on the right then continuing his run to sweep in a first-time finish. Perhaps there was an element of fortune in the loop of the ball over the goalkeeper Émerson Leão, but the key to the goal was his dart in front of Luís Pereira to meet Cruyff’s pass, the awareness of where Cruyff was going to deliver the ball, the instinct to time his movement, and then the technique to guide the ball on target. In a brilliant and brutal game, it was Neeskens, their most brutally brilliant player, who shone.
It was Neeskens who scored the second-minute penalty in the final, Neeskens who had been key to the development of the aggressive press, first at Ajax and then with his national side. Rinus Michels would depute Neeskens to look after the opposition’s playmaker and he would pursue him, often deep into the opposition half. He was, as the Ajax assistant manager, Bobby Haarms, put it, “like a kamikaze pilot”. At first his teammates would be reluctant to follow, but they soon learned, pushing up behind him, relying initially on Velibor Vasovic and later on Horst Blankenburg to protect the space behind the defensive line by stepping up to catch opponents offside.
Johan Neeskens (right) opens the scoring in the Netherland’s 2-0 victory over Brazil at the 1974 World Cup. Photograph: Alamy
After helping Ajax to three successive European Cups and losing in the 1974 World Cup final, Neeskens joined Cruyff at Barcelona. That same summer, Barcelona also signed Marinho. There were no hard feelings: true hard men accepted the odd whack on the jaw as part of the game. Marinho, though, was baffled by this new Dutch style of football.
“Defenders in Brazil would never be able to push up like that,” he explained. “When I went to Barcelona, Michels wanted the centre-backs to push out to make the offside line. In Brazil this was known as the donkey line: people thought it was stupid … the Dutch players wanted to reduce the space and put everybody in a thin band. The whole logic of the offside trap comes from squeezing the game. In Brazil, people thought you could chip the ball over and somebody could run through and beat the offside trap, but it’s not like that because you don’t have time.”
Johan Neeskens scores from the penalty spot past Sepp Maier to give the Netherlands the lead against West Germany in the 1974 World Cup final. Photograph: AP
What Neeskens’s kamikaze charges had shown, though, was that pressing wasn’t just about thwarting the opposition. “In one training session,” Marinho said, “I pushed up and we caught four or five players offside. I was pleased, because it was still new to me and I was finding it difficult, but Michels came and shouted at me. What he wanted was for us then to charge the guy with the ball with the players we had spare because they had men out of the game in offside positions. That’s how offside becomes an offensive game.”
Michels was always clear that Total Football, although it became theorised, was not in origin a theory, but something that developed semi-organically, because of the players at Ajax, many of whom had played together at youth level and become used to adapting their games to each other. Cruyff was the genius, the organiser, the player with probably a more precise understanding of the geometry of the game than anybody else who has ever played it, but Neeskens was the heart; it was his drive, his ferocious stamina, that encouraged the aggressive press.
And yet, like so many of that great Netherlands side, Cruyff excepted, once the magnificence of his playing career was over, he became disconcertingly ordinary. Although Neeskens had stints as assistant manager of the Netherlands (he was on the bench at Wembley when England beat the Dutch 4-1 in 1996), and later with Australia, Barcelona and Galatasaray, his only real success as a head coach came with NEC Nijmegen, whom he led into the Uefa Cup on a shoestring.
Johan Neeskens joined Barcelona as assistant manager to Frank Rijkaard in 2006. Photograph: Gustavo Nacarino/Reuters
I visited him there in 2003 and was overwhelmed by how much time he was willing to spend chatting to a young freelancer. A few weeks later, he called me at home (on the communal phone in the flat I shared – “It’s for you – Johan somebody? Sounded Dutch.”) to answer some minor query I’d directed to the press office, and chattered on for half an hour about the 70s, making me late for a shift at Teletext (“Sorry – I was just about to set off when Johan Neeskens called”; even as I said it I knew it sounded like a ridiculous lie). There was a humility and eagerness to talk about the past that characterised most of that side.
Yet Neeskens the player was tough, icily cool and manifestly exceptional. He would never have said it – the majority of the ego in that side belonged to Cruyff – but without him, Dutch Total Football might have looked a little more like the West German football of the time, clever intermovement and manipulation of space, but without the ferocious press that made it so distinctive and influential. Total Football needed Cruyff, but it also needed Neeskens.
