Welcome to brain Stuff, a production of iHeart Radio. Hey brain Stuff, Lauren Volga bomb here. If your skin begins turning orange, you may feel like the star of a sci fi flick, but there's most likely a more down to earth explanation. Red orange and yellow fruits and vegetables often get their color from a pigment called beta carotene, which our bodies also happen to use to make vitamin A, which is one of the essential vitamins for human health.
That means it's a vitamin that our bodies need in order to function properly, but our bodies can't produce it on their own, but we need to eat particular foods to help out. Vitamin A is involved in all sorts of important bodily processes. It's a component in one of the proteins that make our eyes work. It helps our immune system function, and it supports cell growth in organs
like the heart, lungs, and kidneys. Lucky for us, carrots, cantaloupe, apricots, mangoes, oranges, pumpkin squashs, potatoes, and other red orange foods can be chock full of beta carotene, so chuck full, in fact, that when eaten in large amounts, they can sometimes cause
people to develop an orange skin tone. What happens here is that eating an excessive amount of foods containing beta carotene can cause an overabundance of this pigment in the bloodstream, which in turn builds up in the areas of the body with thicker skin, hands, knees, elbows, feet, and the folds around the nose and produces there a visible orange ish hue. This is called carotenemia, and while the condition is more visible on people who have light colored skin,
people of any skin color can be affected. Carotinemia isn't terribly common, even for people who are fruit and vegetable enthusiasts. It's usually the result of a restricted diet that includes large quantities of some specific fruit or vegetable that's high in beta carotene. There are hundreds of different carotenoid pigments aside from the common beta variant. They're actually named after carrots because the researcher who first identified these molecules was
working with carrot juice. Credit for that goes to German pharmacist Heinrich Vilheim Ferdinand Wachnroeder. In the eighteen thirties. These pigments are also what's responsible for yellow and orange coloration in cultured butter and cheeses that haven't been dyed. That's because carrotenoid pigments also occur in fresh grass, and when a cow eats that grass, the pigments wind up in the cow's milk, blocked away in fat molecules that get broken up when the milk is turned into butter or
cheese like cheddar. A large carrot has about six melograms of beta carotene. These six milligrams will convert to about a thousand micrograms of vitamin A in the human body, which is a little bit more than the recommended daily intake, but even so, with about a twelve to one beta carotene to vitamin A conversion rate, you'd need to eat a hundred and twenty to three hundred carrots per day for several weeks, assuming that that was your only source of the pigment for it to start showing up in
your skin. While orange, yellow, and red fruits and veggies are the primary cause of carotonemia, it can also be caused by foods of other colors. A justice beta carotene is found in grass. It's also found in cabbage, spinach, kiwi, asparagus, and apples, just to name a few. But as long as you don't overdo it, eating produce that contains beta
carotene is great for you. A study published in the American Journal of Public Health in reported that eating just two extra portions of fruits and vegetables a day for six weeks caused a detectible change in skin tone, in that it produced a healthier glow. Today's episode is based on the article It's true eating too many carrots can turn your skin orange on how stuff works dot Com, written by Laurel Dove. Brain Stuff is production of I Heart Radio in partnership of how stuff Works dot Com,
and it is produced by Tyler Clang. Four more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.