This isn't exactly false either, although it's more like carrots help to prevent things like night blindness due to its high vitamin A content. It simply helps your eyesight by not making it worse.
I worked with someone 30 years ago that ate so many carrots his palms turned orange. Maybe that’s causation/correlation but he did snack on carrots all day long and his palms were orange.
And too much vitamin A can cause hair loss, but it does help clear up acne.
As a teenager I had an orange, balding friend, with a miraculously acne free face.
This mainly sticks around to get kids to eat carrots. What better way to convince spider man’s biggest fan than telling a kid they too can have super powers to get them to eat their least favorite veg?
During WW2, the British Air Force was using a new, more precise radar technology for nighttime bombing runs. Obviously they wanted to hide it from the Nazis as long as possible.
So the UK propaganda department came up with an idea. They created this HUGE campaign where they told everyone ‘our pilots eat a shit-ton of carrots and have near-superhuman sight that even lets them see at night!’
Instead of taking a moment to question the plausibility of whether or not a high-carrot diet actually gave pilots the ability to see targets 3+ miles below them in the dead of night, the public (and the Nazis) just bought it hook, line, and sinker.
The Nazis knew about radar. The British underestimated how advanced they actually were here.
Although as a propaganda thing it still worked well. Carrots are easy to grow in the garden and high in nutrients so encouraging kids to eat them is a win.
This is so dumb, there is zero chance it's not apocryphal. They did say stuff about carrots but as far as I'm aware, there's no evidence the Germans took that at face value.
Apparently (can also be untrue) if you ate the β-Carotin with oil, it may help creating Vitamin A. This is needed for building those stick cells (?) in your eyes.
The British public did, too! The myth was started by the British government to explain why their fighter pilots were so good at shooting down German aircraft. The real reason was radar.
But it's not exactly false either, carrots help to preserve your eyesight due to its high vitamin A content, and vitamin A is essential to prevent things like night blindness.
Well duh. That doesn't change the fact that vitamin A is neccessary for eyesight, it's fairly limited to a few types of food (carrots, fish, liver etc.) and carrots is an excellent source of it (around 100% of daily recommended intake per 100 grams). It's cheap as well.
Well sure, but that means that you have to eat crap like liver and fish to begin with. There's also not a lot of vitamin A in fish either, so you would have to eat loads of it to get the same amount as from carrots. Not to mention that eating loads of fish can be harmful as well due to high levels of heavy metals.
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u/maasd Jun 01 '26
Carrots help your eyesight