The Case Against Carrots For Eye Health

Eat yo carrots you lil punk, those orange sticks of goodness loved by Bugs Bunny does wonders to your vision and improves your eye health.

So says every optometrist to every ignorant kid who needs glasses at a young age.

I mean, it’s universally known that eating more carrots help you see better. Makes your eyes brighter. And of course, reduces the risk of vision-related illnesses.

Or is it true?

Here’s some news for you that you may or may not rejoice over.

Carrots do indeed help sharpen your vision.

They do keep you in tip-top eye health, and they do reduce the risk of vision-related illnesses like cataracts in future.

Which also means your doctor and parents were pretty dang right on that.

Partially.

You see, the magic of carrots lie in beta-carotene, a chemical that your body uses to make vitamin A, the vitamin that protects your eyes.

“In the dead of night, just how did the British Air Force manage to gun down German aircraft during World War II? Eating carrots was the key to the pilots’ success, according to the U.K. Ministry of Food. The now-defunct agency rolled out a propaganda campaign detailing the pilots’ superb carrot-enriched night vision and encouraging civilians to devour more of the locally grown vegetable to help them function during blackouts. The root vegetable is rich in beta-carotene, a naturally occurring pigment that nourishes the eye.

Decades later rumors swirled that the British Royal Air Force pushed that message as a cover-up for the recently adopted radar technology they were secretly relying on for their nighttime skirmishes. Information from the de Havilland Aircraft Museum suggests that subterfuge was indeed the British Ministry of Information’s plan. But Bryan Legate, assistant curator at the Royal Air Force Museum in London has a different view. “I would say that whilst the [British] Air Ministry were happy to go along with the story [of carrot-improved vision], they never set out to use it to fool the Germans,” Legate says. “The German intelligence service were well aware of our ground-based radar installation and would not be surprised by the existence of radar in aircraft. In fact, the RAF were able to confirm the existence of German airborne radar simply by fitting commercial radios into a bomber and flying over France listening to the various radio frequencies!” he adds.”

-quoted from an article about carrots and eye health from Scientific American which describes how the belief came about

Read it or not, your call.

Anywhats, where was I?

Ah. Beta-carotene.

Truth is, everyone has beta-carotene receptors of varying sensitivities.

Different individuals respond to beta-carotene differently, is what I’m preaching.

Which also means that if your receptors don’t respond well to beta-carotene, you won’t be able to enjoy the vision boost carrots provide.

Some may thus find carrots an excellent food for developing hawk-like vision, while some may find carrots to be nothing more than a dry, hard and edible stick.

(I know what you’re thinking of, you dirty one)

Still, I still advocate eating carrots as they are packed with vitamins and essential minerals, though they may or may not help with your vision.

As always, I’m yuge on experimentation.

As a wise old man once said, if you never try you never know.

What I’d do, if I were you, would be to try eating carrots for a week or two, and look at the effect it has on my vision.

If it does indeed help, which also means my receptors are pretty dang responsive to beta-carotene, I’ll stick to it.

If not, I’ll just keep carrots off my daily diet and treat them as occasional snacks.

Simple as that.

There are a ton of foods out there which claim to be able to help with your vision.

Most of them, like carrots, have varying effects on different individuals.

So, it’s down to how willing you are to try them out on your own and see what these foods do.

By the way, I have a free e-letter which you can sign up for free where I share about how anyone can use natural means to improve their health and well-being.

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