Can you get night vision by eating carrots?

If you ever believed that eating carrots makes you see clearly in the dark, you believed the ghosts of the British civil servants of the 1940s.

If you already know that the old-schooled adage was made up by the propagandists of the second world war, you may have accepted that Britain wanted to distract Germany from its advanced aeronautical radar technology.

According to this statement, the RAF was able to stop night raids by the Luftwaffe because its pilots ate a lot of carrots -- so Nazi spies did not have to worry about advanced British radar technology. But once again, you are cheated. The propaganda about eating more carrots was intended primarily to deceive the British themselves, not the Third Reich.

After the Surrender of France in 1940, Britain was left alone and cut off the connections from the rest of the empire by German U-boats. Keeping the British on the home front well was vital for the long haul, but for an island like this, it was hard to import food. But the British weather turned out to be perfect for growing carrots. There is another problem. British consumers do not like carrots.

John Stolarczyk, director of the World Carrot Museum said, “The carrot was never a popular vegetable before World War II, and it was seen as a poor man’s vegetable.”

However, carrot production in Britain soared by 300 percent during the war. So, the government faces a hard situation, planting too many carrots that will go to waste if public attitudes do not change. Stolarczyk says, “The government is selling carrots in large quantities, mainly because they are readily available, people don’t need to import food, and they don’t need to worry about being attacked at sea, and carrots are a viable alternative to rationing.”

British Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s government decided to tell a white lie to the public. Posters were plastered all over the place trumpeting the carrots’ so-called night vision components, linking them to the success of the RAF. In fact, the effectiveness of RAF pilots on night missions is due to their airborne radar systems.

Like most convincing lies, there is truth in this propaganda. First, carrots contain high levels of beta-carotene and lutein, antioxidants that the body needs to produce vitamin A. This vitamin helps the eyes convert light into signals that travel to the brain for image processing, especially in low-light environments. In other words, carrots may help people with vitamin A deficiency to improve their vision, but they do not improve normal vision. In addition, according to a report in the “Community Eye Health Journal” in 2013, people’s corneas may be damaged if they are deficient in vitamin A.

Second, British scientists did carry out experiments to see if carrots could improve pilots’ eyesight, but those studies found nothing valuable. It was airborne radar, not the diet of the pilots, that gave the British fighters the advantage, and it is unlikely that British propagandists believed their propaganda could mislead the German leadership. Moreover, when a British plane with airborne radar crash-landed in France in 1941, the Germans rescued the wreckage, discovered the technology, and immediately began work on a similar system.

Stolarczyk said, “the campaign is clearly more important to the British people than the Germans. If it is targeting primarily at the German intelligence services, it would be a bit weird to publish it openly in a British newspaper. The German fellows are not that stupid.”