BrainStuff Classics: Do Carrots Really Help Your Eyesight?

a beautiful pegasus. Just me, anyway, When I told my parents this, they told me, Lauren, if you want to have that kind of hyper acute night vision, you've got to eat your carrots. It's common wisdom. Eat a lot of carrots if you want eyes like a jet pilot. But do carrots really give you better eyesight? The short answer is, if you already have enough vitamin A in your diet, probably not. But if you don't, a big old sack of carrots might be exactly what you need.

Carrots are full of a nutrient called beta carotene, which is a kind of natural dye for fruits and vegetables. Plants to use beta carotine in their bodies as a pigment that gives them a yellow or orange color. But when you eat foods containing this natural pigment, like sweet potatoes, spinach, or carrots, the beta carotene gets absorbed by your intestinal wall and converted into vitamin A. So here's the true

part of the myth. If you want to maintain normal eye health, you've got to get enough vitamin A, and carrots are a perfectly good source. In regions where people don't get much vitamin A in their diets, vision problems are rampant. Without vitamin A, the photoreceptors in your eyes

start to deteriorate, and your corneas can actually vanish. But if you don't have a vitamin A deficiency and your vision is already healthy, stuffing your face with carrots or any other source of the vitamin will not lead to superhuman eyeball powers. So where did we get the idea that carrots can do to your eyes what spinach does to popeye's forearms. Believe it or not, this myth got a big boost from World War II Baganda. During World War II, the United Kingdom underwent air raids conducted by

Axis powers. The German left Buffo would strike at British cities in the night. Over the years, the British Royal Air Force had some success pushing back the German air attacks. One explanation for their success is that from nineteen thirty nine onward, British pilots had access to a technology called on board airborne interception radar to help them spot enemy

planes for a great distance. But the UK Ministry of Food launched a propaganda campaign claiming that its fighter pilots could pick out enemy aircraft in the dark because they honed their eyes with carrots. Some sources have speculated that this story was designed to hide the existence of the Royal Air Forces on board radar system from the enemy. Another explanation might be simple economics. Germans set up blockades to use starvation and discomfort as weapons, which meant that

many goods like sugar had to be rationed. The UK government encouraged its citizens to turn to sugar substitutes. For example, carrots, which were plentiful even during the war, could be used as a sweetener in foods like carrot pudding and carrot fudge, or as a substitute for meat in the infamous Wolton pie. Carrots were so plentiful because they could be grown by citizens at home and around their communities in a so

called victory gardens. Food supplies were loaded due to those blockades, and canned fruits and vegetables largely went to feed the military. Citizens were encouraged to make up the difference. The slogan of the campaign was dig for Victory. Two million private gardens were constructed and some public ones as well. The dry moat surrounding the Tower of London was filled in with growing vegetables. Today's episode is based on a videoscript

that Joan Kormick wrote Poor House stuffworks dot com. The Brainstuff is production of iHeartRadio in partnership with how Stuffworks dot Com and is produced by Tyler Klang. Four more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.