and then I’ll leave y’all alone:
Nanna’s rule of eating carrots to boost night vision is doing our peepers more harm than good, eye specialist Paul Beaumont says.
Dr Beaumont has been studying human retinas since 1976 and says the carrot myth, started in World War II, is a "complete fabrication".
"When the English … were flying at night they used radar but the Germans didn’t know that radar existed," Dr Beaumont said from his Sydney clinic.
"The English certainly didn’t want them to know so they put out a myth saying they were feeding their pilots carrots to improve their night vision and that’s why they could fly and see things at night.
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Vitamin A, in large quanitites, is very poisonous to humans. It nearly killed Douglas Mawson. Carrots are rich in Vitamin A.
Now that’s cool.
Not sure about all the other ‘research’.
Mawson got the Vit A poisoning from the dog livers he was eating as he struggled to get back from the South Pole.
OK, note to self, go easy on the dog livers…
Don’t do any Antarctic exploration. It’s very bad for your health.
Use the Franklin method of Arctic exploration instead. You die even sooner, but much more spectacularly. Still avoid those dog livers, though.
OTOH, my father used to be in the airforce in the 1950s, and he said that when the mess served carrots, everyone knew there would be night flying 😉
Ha! That’s awesome!
Here’s one I heard today:
http://www.consumeraffairs.com/news04/2009/07/alzheimers_coffee.html
🙂
Woohoo!
I think I need some coffee.
If you want to save your sight eat butter, not margerine. Margerine consumption is linked to macular degeneration.
I don’t eat either.
Except in brownies.
brownies don’t count
I thought it was polar bear livers that had deadly amounts of Vitamin A. But I suppose in the Arctic if you were starving it was a choice between dogs and polar bears… Apparently the starving explorers ate the livers because they were soft and warm, and could be eaten with frozen fingers and scorbutic mouths far more easily than the rest of the dog/bear.
you folks clearly read much grosser books than I do!
Mawson lost most of his supplies (and companions) on the way back to the pole, so he had to kill his huskies to survive. I do feel sorry for those dogs, and yes the liver was soft so that’s why they ate it. If you want the real story read douglas Mawson’s Home of the Blizzard. It ‘s a great read.
On the other hand, my doctor told me that I ought to eat two carrots a day to get a good amount of Vitamin A. Tactfully, he added, “Your need for it increases as you get older.”
Wow, that was very interesting.