Honey blindness

Eating too much sweet food in a short period.

A yutaaq's natural diet is not high in sweet foods and, combined with a naturally high metabolism, they can overwhelm their body's ability to process sugar very quickly. Unlike ialy, which digest a meal over the course of several days, yutaaq may take less than a day to process food.

Despite this, they have the ability to taste sugar and generally find it very appealing. In small quantities, or when combined with fat or fibre, sugar does not cause problems, but sudden spikes of high blood sugar caused by large quantities of sugar-rich foods, such as honey, causes a temporary loss of vision.

Beginning with a gradual loss of colour perception and progressing to blurred vision or difficulty focusing (especially on distant objects), honey blindness worsens to darkening vision starting at the periphery, leading to tunnel vision and finally total blindness.

Effects can last for 30-120 minutes before beginning to clear, but cases which have progressed to total blindness may linger for up to 24 hours.

Repeated incidences - lifelong overindulgence - can cause the blindness, either total or partial, to become permanent.

The effects pass in time, but there are many folk-remedies to hasten the process, including drinking water, with or without salt, and eating dry foods, such as uncooked rice or stale bread.

Almost all yutaaq in cosmopolitan have experienced honey blindness at one time or another. The most common cause is consumption of sweet foods targeted at ialy without diluting them to a safe level.