Parents often tell their kids from an early age to eat all of their vegetables if they want to grow up strong and healthy. Sometimes, adults urge children to eat specific vegetables for specific benefits.
One such connection that is typically made – eat your carrots to get better eyesight. We asked our readers for food-related legends they’ve heard over the years, and many responded with the classic claim about carrots improving vision. Nutrient-rich vegetables have all kinds of health benefits, so could this one actually be true?
Carrots contain vitamins that can help maintain good eye health, but your diet most likely already includes plenty of those vitamins with or without carrots. Adding more vitamins from carrots won’t help you see better.
The reason people began to believe carrots would improve your vision is because of British WWII propaganda.
During WWII, the United Kingdom was successfully using radar to track and shoot down German bomber planes, the U.S. Department of Defense says. To keep the Germans from finding out about the radar system, the U.K. tried to use some misdirection. Their citizens, the British government claimed, were just really good at seeing airplanes.
“So in order to hide it, they claimed that basically what’s happening here is that carrots are improving the vision of their pilots,” said Bwalya Lungu, Ph.D., a food science and food folklore professor at the University of California Davis. “That’s what’s improving their vision; it’s because they’re eating so many carrots.”