Carrots Do Not Improve Eyesight
**Secret Revealed**
Like many kids, I didn’t like vegetables — especially carrots and broccoli. Adults frequently told me that carrots would improve my eyesight, so that seemed like a good reason to try liking them.
There was one person who didn’t tell me this, he actually told me the opposite. My grandfather overheard somebody tell me that carrots would improve my eyesight and he let me in on a little secret — it was all a big lie. Carrots do not improve your eyesight.
Sure, carrots and many other foods do contain beta-carotene, which metabolizes into Vitamin A and everyone agrees that is essential for maintaining eye health, but it does not improve it. If you are not consuming enough vitamin A, any number of sources could help restore your vitamin A supply. Carrots themselves are not unique or magical in this way. In fact, carrots have less beta-carotene per 200 calorie serving than red peppers, kale and lettuce.
Photo available in Flickr, under a Creatve Commons License
If lettuce, kale and red pepper have more beta-carotene than carrots, why do carrots get all the eyesight credit?
During World War II, the British were particularly good at shooting down Nazi bombers at night, when it’s almost impossible to see other planes. It was as if they had super-human sight, and they did. They had radar.
Once news stories started to circulate about these pilots with seemingly super-human eyes, the government needed a good explanation to prevent the Germans from learning about this technology. Carrots.
Flight Lieutenant John Cunningham, nicknamed ”Cats Eyes” for his incredible ability to shoot down enemy planes, had a natural love for carrots. The story wrote itself and they explained that they were feeding other pilots a lot of carrots to improve their eyesight too.
Chad Upton is the editor-in-chief of Broken Secrets and an official Yahoo Answers contributor.
Sources: duke health, snopes, self.com
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Cool story! I thought carrots really did improve your eyesight.
I love this explanation! This is wonderful!
It’s so nice when an “Old Wives Tale” has a real, honest-to-goodness reason to have gotten started, instead of the usual bit where it’s simply lost in the fog of time.
ya ur right
Knew it. I’ve got 20-20 vision and i hate those orange bastards
mmmm
Amazing post. Massive eye-opener and lovely background. Thanks!
No. The story onrginated by the english during WWII to cover up a secret called Airborne Intecptor Radar.
My cousin (KIA June. 1944), an American bomber pilot said in a letter that the Army had all the pilots eating carrots.
intarstin
If carrots improved your eyesight, rabbits would not cross the road in front of cars and get hit. No, that is an old wives tale.
I myself use glasses for correcting vision. When I eat carrits, my vision feels a ot better than the day I do not eat carrots. This topic attempts to clear up theories behind the “old wife tale” but I still believe that carrots do help!
Huh. Guess you learn something new everyday.
Carrots don’t improve eyesight because peoples bodies are clogged up with animal fats. Same reason why bananas are deemed bad.
Hopefully one day fruit will stop getting blamed for the damaging affects of animal fat.
Beta-carotene doesn’t improve eyesight because it doesn’t cross the blood brain barrier like lutein does.
Its very hard for the body to break down carrot fiber so try a liter a day of raw fresh squeezed carrot juice for 2 weeks or until your hair on your head holds itself up.
Butterhead lettuce is a much better option for eyesight since its much higher in lutein than carrots.
yeah. its a huge lie. i tried dieting on carrots for a month (only carrots, water, and occasionaly a bit of meat). I have 20/80 or 20/90 vision (which is quite bad). got it tested after the month. nothing changed.
yes i didnt know that untilmy mom told me that and if you dont like carrots just dip them in mayonnaise and they will be yummy !!
greenman said “No. The story onrginated by the english during WWII to cover up a secret called Airborne Intecptor Radar.”
Isn’t that EXACTLY what the post claimed?
You ruined it, now carrots mean nothing to me. Thanks….
Carrots-chan are soooo kawaii!! ^_^ I sarang carrots because they are ichiban desu!! ^^ :3 hehe, Girls’ Generation unnis have big, beautiful kawaii eyes O.O because they eat carrots hehe :33 <3 ^_^
I Think Carrots Do Help Your Eye Sight
Total BS, carrots do help vision, all the people who claim they tried and didn’t didn’t try long enough or did something wrong (like the person who said people are clogged with animal fat.) Most Americans are malnutritioned anyways. Somehow straining your eyes to see out of plastic lenses all day is a better alternative than nutrition, just another way optometrists make more money.
Well you’ve done it, you’ve ruined the way parents make their kids like carrots, might aswel tell the the sand man and Santa Claus is not real…..
You’re exactly right and I’m glad to see this as a featured story on Y!A. I’ve been telling people this for years on here (and those answers were sometimes ignored and a “carrots” answer was chosen. LOL!)!
My Dad used to tell me carrots were good for your eyesight and his reasoning for this was that you never saw a rabbit wearing glasses.
wow. i can’t believe that I actually believe that carrots improve the eyesight.
Actually, in my experience, carrots do improve sight. When i was a kid i ate them on a daily bases and my sight is, medically proved, 20.5/20, that means i see more than i should. That’s in my experience
YES THEY CAN!
Nutrition matters but doesn’t necessarily make something better than normal just keeps you healthy.
As Paul Harvey said, “now you know… the rest of the story.”
Wow. 0__0
Enough to eat 100 grams of carrots to provide the body with the necessary daily intake of carotene.
Carrots dont turn your eye into Rinnegan xD but it keeps your eyes in a good condition.
Once I ate a whole bag of baby carrots while watching a movie and it made my poop orange.
you never see a rabbit wearing glasses
When , as a kid, i questioned my Mother on this, her answer was
have you ever seen a rabbit wearing glasses ?
made me eat mine as a kid.
Thanks Chad for your wonderful story and EYE catching explanation… Now that this is a great “truth”… perhaps someone else can REALLY show me where to find the REAL TRUTH with scientific evidence as a back up?
I swear something always smelled fishy when someone tells me carrots improve eye sight! also my cousin has a bad eyes sight, he always eats carrots but nothing changed with his vision..
carrots require vitamine c witch help you improve your eye sight. so carrots do improve your eye sight!!!
No they don’t it’s just something Britain said to the Germans when we envented radar.
oh my gosh
i dont know what to believe in anymore. I loved carrots all my life and now i just find out iève been lied to all these years. ill never look at them the same way again!
aaaaand how do you know this is true again….? \:|
@Yummy
For goddsakes I hope you are a troll. That is just too much.
actualy carrats do improve ur eyesight its got vitamin a
Even though carrots are can’t improve your eye site, they can keep it from getting worse if you eat enough of them.
LOL! Even if they did i’m colorblind so it makes almost no difference…
hey if u can get ur kids to eat them try a little honey on them and butter that will do the trick.
sorry, but I’ve never met a child who didn’t like any vegetables of some sort.
i never heard of carrots improving eyesight, but blue barriers
wrong carrots do improve your eyesight
Wow what a cool story, my brother once told me this, i never actually believed him lol. (:
Well I’ve never seen a rabbit wearing glasses
Yes They do.
There is joke in our local language,
Q:Carrots Improve eyesight?
A:Yes,You ever seen Rabbit having Glasses.Because they eat tooo much
no it was said in ww2 because they were the easiest veg to grow and could withstand hard conditions so there u go
very nice
It’s a falacy ! It all started during the last war ! We’d discovered radar and wanted to keep the secret awayfrom the Germans – so, as our planes were able to ‘find’ the Luftwaffe in the dark, this ‘myth’ was put about that carrots actually did improve one’s eyesight ! Of course carrots are good for you ! All vegetables are ! But the eyesight fable is one that’s stood the test of time, I’m afraid !
whatever, I’m still eating them because of Louis.
It is not true that carrots will help you see better but the beta carotene ( idk if i spelt that right or not) is very good for your eyes. During w1 and ww2 Bombers were required to eat carrots in large quantity to help them see better at night which did work but it also gave their skin a dak orange pigment.
Oh and another thing the beta carotene dosen’t turn into vitamn A until it goes through your liver but like everybody else you need veggies so eat them
haha man now i have a story for my little brother which make him to eat carrot and others vegis
Do you soppose they call it a old wives tale to explain that it is stupid and a women probably made it up.
CARROTS improve your eyesight but that does not mean that u just eat them 1 day and say that my eysight is nit better.It makes your eyesight better if you keep on eating them for minimum 1 month because it has got a Vitamin A.(: hope your eyesight get well..
Finally!
I used to eat carrots every few days cos they tasted nice, and they supposedly made your eye-sight better. At the age of 11 I gave up! i went to the Eye Clinic and they told me I had horrible eye sight for a 16 year old and probably won’t get good eye sight ever again.
SO HA! I will not eat my carrots!
Thanks for the article
x
According to Popeye, spinach has helped many Navy sailors to increase muscle mass, particularly in the bicep and forearm regions… Any clarification on that one?
Carrots are good for your eyes, but so are any orange vegetable or fruit like say a peach. I don’t know about you ladies and gentlemen but as a Southerner I would rather eat a sweet juicy peach any day.
I dont mean to sound like a “know it all” but I knew tht they like help your sight, but its not like if u hve astigmatism then if you eat carrots for dinner then you wont need your glasses/contacts anymore… it helps with your eye HEALTH not eye SIGHT like you said…
Yes, carrots can help your eyesight, but no more than a vitamin pill would. Carrots ARE good for helping to clean out your colon, but so is any other vegetable. So, “Eat up your vegetables, Johnny,” WAS good advice, even if your parents didn’t know why they were giving it.
No surprise there. I’ve always liked and ate carrots but I have 20/200 vision lol.
yes they do help with your eyesite that is why sometimes the docters tell you to eat carrots so you dont have to end up in glasses or go blind.
Good information, Thank you for sharing this information online.
Seems to me like the Popeye and spinach legend: Spinach was assumed to contain lots of iron that would build up your muscles; turned out later that it was a lie.
I really DO love carrots, btw, but I’m short-sighted nonetheless (it’s genetic, you can’t change it through food), but I sort of admire the industry how they always come up with new ideas to market beta-carotene. Some people still believe it gives you a more natural suntan in a solarium if you swallow two or three carotene pills ten minutes before. Ey, biology anyone? That WON’T work!
But, you know, scraped carrots with just a bit of onion, olive oil and some salt is just the BEST you can do to say, a decent steak.
It’s not the Vitamin A that improves vision it’s the high content of beta carotene.
If you really want to improve your vision faster then carrots buy some goji/wolf berries.
in my country grown-ups tell kids that carrots make the eyes look prettier xD
carrots dont improve ur eyesight, just keep them from getting worse
i bet they say that so kids eat more vegetables
I should’ve figured as much. I’ve been wearing glasses pretty much since I was born and eat plenty of carrots to see if my sight will get better. Nothing.
The curvature of your eye determines your eyesight.Lazer surgery to correct curvature or eyeglass’s improve your eyesight
My whole life’s been a lie!
yes it can! improve your eyesight quite it bit. but most importantly, getting alot of sleep and not drinking anything that has sugar in it.
I Think Carrot is very good for our eye.
yes! I like this question.
Interesting, as I read an article in a national newspaper not 30 minutes ago stating that they DO improve eyesight, due to the production of a substance called “lutein”, which protects the lenses of eyes as we age. Here’s the link: http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/woman/health/health/4086753/Do-carrots-really-make-you-see-better.html . An interesting debate !
I arrived over here from Yahoo Answers. I wear specks and I wanted to get rid of them. This post literally opened my eyes and I rarely eat carrots ever since. But do you think that carrots at least keep the eyesight from getting worse, like tom said?
I heard spinach could
Carrots are great but did you know they are good for your Dog too (my dog loves them) they are good for a snack
They are great for their teeth,bones,everything on a dog
I knew this. I love carrots and I don’t have great vision. I have always loved them but still have had glasses since I was 11 years old. So I always knew that it wasn’t true.
mmmmm carrots =)
Yes,
I know they don’t work. I ate so many carrots when I was a baby that my nose turned orange. I don’t have very good eyesight now.
Oh man! I have to have glasses and i’ve been eating carrots a lot because of it. At least now i’ve learned to like them.
Thanks your explanation is wonderful. i rarely eat carrot but am on speck reccently is possble for carrot to improve my vision if i embark on eaten it.
so no matter how many carrots i eat, i will still have to wear glasses
me gustan las zanahorias
i love carrots. hmmm.
I have amazing eyesight and haven’t ever eaten a carrot. My social studies teacher told my class a story (true story) about a girl who ate carrots her whole life and her hair turned orange. So if you want orange hair eat carrots but if you don’t well, don’t eat them.
I knew this was a myth before I even read the story.
Well, if we look on the interstate, obviously not!
you are wrong carrots do help your eyesight maybe you did not eat carrots but your parents did so there gentical health come to you. I have bad eye sight but now i eat carrots and now i have greatt eye sight. So everybody that commented you is wrong. So believe me a scientists
son
World War story was awesome
I have always been skeptical about how true this was. I use to eat carrots everyday and my eyesight is horrible!
Cuss they mamas don’t. Feed it to them and hey never tried it
so it was all a lie :O
You only talk about vitamin A here. What about Vitamin C?
This is a lie. I love carrots yet I have the worst eyesight ever. My glasses slowly get worse and worse. I eat more and more carrots. They do not improve my eyesight at least. Maybe other peoples’ eyesight but certainly not mine.
I’m glad this story is out
I eat carrots all the time because people tell me it improves my eyesight but I have horrible eyesight.
Wow no duh it doesn’t improve your eyesight. It won’t make a blind person see again. It helps keep your eyes healthy. Stupid.
Lol, good story thanks i never knew that. But hey, who did?
Isn’t ‘J’ clever?
Yes, carrots help, but if you don’t like then – there is a vitamin “Lutein” made by Botanic Choice. I take 2 daily & my eyesight is 20/20.
I have worse eyesight than my mum (I don’t have glasses, but she has perfect vision) and I eat way more carrots than her. I’m gonna stop now. FK It.
Carrots – unlike broccoli – are BAD for your eyesight!
Hard pointy things, totally unsafe for human consumption, you could poke an eye out with one of those things!
In fact, I WOULD have poked an eye out with a carrot if it hadn’t been for my glasses. YES, the bright orange colour should be a sufficient warning (that the carrots don’t manage to get a RED colour or black/yellow striping the way other dangerous things naturally do is not something they can be BLAMED for; likewise, flamingo’s [nasty nasty feathered airborne death missiles] are pink through no fault of their own).
—- stilll —–
CARROTS, BAD for your eyesight!
Well, they really don’t improve your vision. They (and other fruits and vegetables) just help your eyes adjust to lighting better. So that you don’t cry, “It burns!” when somebody turns on the light in your bedroom and so that you don’t trip over anything and everything when you get up for a drink of water in the middle if the night.
If you’re driving down the road, your eyes will adjust more quickly to the headlights of an oncoming car, but will re-adjust just as quickly when that car has passed.
But if you have, say, an astigmatism in your eyes, carrots won’t take the place of glasses or of contact lenses.
Yes, magical carrots give you the epic power to see like your fellow rabbits. Buggs Bunny for example can see AMAZING because he eats so many carrots and is always like “wussup doc!?” so ya, I’m cool like that…and I like Buggs Bunny!
BUGGS BUNNY 4EVA MAN! PEASE 2 DA WORLD!!!!!
HA!!!!! lol i knew it
NOOOOO. DAM. is there anything that WOULD improve eye sights?
that is true
I am not sure if it will help or not with our eyesight. But the carrot has a good taste when souped. It is sweet!
I love this explanation! This is wonderful!
This is really intersting
I really need to send my parents this link
i remeber when they fed me carrott juice! yuck!
yes, i am 100% agree with you………
Bilberry is suppost to help your eyesight. It won’t cure eye diseases, but everyone I’ve talked to says it helps you to “get the most” out of what sight you do have. Mostly makes your vision more “crisp”. It’s kind of like AA for games.You can get supplements on amazon.com… The comments speak for themselves. Carrots have vitamins that are good for your eyes, but there are MUCH MORE POWERFUL supplements out there than carrots.
CARROTS ARE GUD FOR YOU I DIDN”T READ THE ARTICLE BUT I BET IT”S GUD
REALLY!!! It improved my eyesight! HAHA…………
wellll my orthodontist told me to not eat anything like carrots because of my braces. i love carrots tho…. oh well haha
About Carrots..
My mom always told us to eat our carrots because you’ve never seen a blind Rabbit have you ?
As a child we believed that!!… How stupid can one feel now that I think of it these days!!
Ok? I thought you normally write interesting stuff.
Nah, it’s a big lie. I think so! O.O’
Carrots help mantain eyes sight. Good vegetable to eat in your daily requirements of 3 to 4 serving of fruits/vegetales per day…
Yes, because carrots includes vitamins for providing energy for your eyes. For example, maybe not with carrot but, you can check with fish. If you eat that then you will think more clear since it includes P, to provide your brain energy.
Lovvve this
carrots do improve your eyesight if you dont get enough vitimin a or its precurser beta carotene in early childhood your eyesight suffers but theres not much point eating it if your over seven…there is a point in making yoru kids eat their carrots and broccolli unfortunatly for them:)
My mom always said to eat carrots for better eyesight. I use to ate a lot of carrots and didn’t notice any difference and still wear my glasses.