Growing up, did you always find that your mother stuck a big glass of carrot juice in front of you and said something incomprehensible about how one of the great benefits of carrot juice included the ability to see better when you would drive at night one day? You have always wondered if this could be for real.
Or is this something that all mothers got together and dreamed up to get you to eat healthy? The benefits of carrot juice and carrots are easy to see - carrots contain vitamin A, and vitamin A is essential for an ability to see when it's dark.
If you get less of it than you should have in your diet everyday, you begin to see less well in the dark.
That's not to mean that vitamin A is a magic pill.
Fill up on carrots three times a day, and it's not really going to do anything for your vision once your body has as much as it can use.
How does the body get the vitamin A that is in carrots? Bright orange root vegetables like carrots have lots of a substance called carotenoids.
When you eat carrots, the body converts the substance into vitamin A.
What does the body do with the vitamin A it does get? It uses it in the making of rhodopsin, a substance that helps your eyes remain healthy.
If you have less Vitamin A than you need, you really would experience every kind of visual problem - poor night vision included.
You would have dry eyes too, for instance.
You need to have vitamin A to help your eyes produce tears.
You end up with eyes that feel like sandpaper every time you blink if you are running low on your stocks of Vitamin A.
The benefits of carrot juice includes better eye health overall.
So vitamin A and carrots are good for you.
The way people say it though, it often sounds like you couldn't possibly come to any harm filling your plate up with every kind of carrot product.
Eat too many carrots, and you could find that you have a hard time keeping a healthy head of hair.
You could also turn into Samuel L.
Jackson's character in the movie Unbreakable - with glass bones.
Your liver would stop working, and you would turn yellow - not figuratively, but literally.
The orange pigment of the carrots you ate would begin to color your skin.
The bottom line is, you rarely ever run the risk of eating too many carrots.
You need the vitamin A you get from carrots for better eye health.
Once you reach the limits of the kind of eyesight your genetics allow you, eating any more carrots really won't do anything for you.