Carrots Are a Great Health Food (Just Don’t as Many as Bugs Bunny)

Don’t tell the Looney Tunes cartoonists who have been drawing Bugs Bunny for decades, but if you eat too many carrots, the excess beta-carotene that doesn’t get converted to vitamin A could turn your skin yellow.

And while it is true that carrots are good for your eye health overall, it is not true that carrots help you see better in the dark. That myth was invented by the British in World War I to try to scare Germans into thinking Brit pilots could see them in the dark.

All things considered, it should not stop you from chomping away on the crunchy root vegetable because many experts consider it a near perfect food. Afterall, carrots (Daucus carota) are rich in dietary fiber, vitamin K1, potassium, and antioxidants that protect the integrity of body cells. Plus, they’re low in calories. Over the years, they’ve been been shown to have a number of health benefits including helping to lower cholesterol and a reduced risk of cancer.

More to the point, like apricots, cantaloupes, mangoes, sweet potatoes, and yams, carrots are rich in beta-carotene, a deep yellow pigment your body converts to a form of vitamin A, the nutrient that protects your eyes, skin, mucous membranes, and reproductive system.

Unlike retinol, the vitamin A found in animal foods such as liver, beta-carotene is non-toxic even in large amounts. But it is fat soluble, so if you regularly gorge on very large quantities of carrots—say, two cups a day for several months—any beta-carotene not used to make the vitamin will continue to circulate in your blood. From there it will be carried into areas covered with thicker skin and thus likely to have more fatty tissue underneath. That means that, piece by piece, beta-carotene will tint the palms of your hands, the soles of your feet, your knees and elbows, and, interestingly, the folds of skin around your nose.

While the change is more obvious in people with light-color skin, it affects all humans. People with darker skin still have lighter-skin palms, and the tint, perhaps faint, will be visible there. But the whites of everyone’s eyes will stay white because overindulging in beta-carotene is not like having jaundice, which does color the whites yellow.

Melissa Piliang, MD, who chairs the department of dermatology at Cleveland Clinic, has been quoted as noting that the resulting condition—called carotenemia or carotenosis—“is pretty uncommon, but we probably see one or two cases a year.” To be one of those cases, she estimates you’d have to consume about 20 to 50 milligrams of beta-carotene per day for a few weeks to raise your levels enough to see skin discoloration. In real-life terms, one medium carrot has about 4 milligrams of beta-carotene in it, so, individual differences aside, the general trigger dose would appear be about 10 carrots a day for several weeks.

Either way, the result will fade when you cut out the pigmented foods. Such happenings are neither new nor confined to the United States. For example, back in 1999, The Times of London detailed a 4-year-old Welsh girl who glowed golden after drinking about 50 fluid ounces (more than 6.5 cups) of Procter & Gamble’s Sunny Delight every day.

In the end, when she eliminated the drink, she eventually faded back to normal, and the British P&G people whipped up a TV commercial showing a snowman turning yellow after raiding a fridge for Sunny Delight.

In short, carotenemia appears to be annoying but not dangerous. The treatment is simple: Stop bingeing on beta-carotene. Smart folks recovering their natural color will also do well to follow the Cleveland Clinic advice to focus on the boring old multicolor balanced diet with a variety of fruits, vegetables, lean proteins, healthy fats, and complex carbs.

And the cartoonists who have been drawing Bugs Bunny since 1940 have yet to alter his gray-and-white birthday fur.