Fact or Myth: Does Gajar (Carrot) Improve Your Eyesight?

Partly true. Gajar can protect eyesight in people short of vitamin A, because that shortage causes night blindness, but carrots won’t sharpen normal eyes, lower your glasses number or let you see in the dark.

Why everyone believes carrots help your eyes

Every winter, when the deep red desi gajar piles up on the thelas and the whole house smells of halwa slowly cooking in ghee and milk, somebody at the table says it to the child pushing food around the plate: “Kha lo, nazar tez hogi,” eat up and your eyes will get sharper. Sweet line. Loving, too.

There’s a famous story behind it too. During the Second World War, the popular account goes, Britain spread the idea that its night pilots ate lots of carrots, partly to hide that they were using new radar. Whether carrots really covered for radar is argued about by historians, but the carrot campaign itself was real, and the idea stuck around the world.

It has a real root.

What vitamin A actually does for your eyes

Picture the back of your eye as a cinema screen covered in millions of tiny light catchers, and imagine that the ones working the night shift, the ones that let you find your chappal in a dark room, can only do their job with a pigment the body builds out of vitamin A, so when vitamin A runs low that pigment runs short too. Simple. The first sign is struggling to see at dusk or in a dark room, called night blindness (in Urdu, rataundhi).

It gets worse. A long, severe shortage dries out the front of the eye and can damage it for good. In some poorer parts of the world, vitamin A deficiency is still a leading cause of preventable blindness in young children. That is a serious, real problem, and food with vitamin A genuinely protects against it.

Carrots are one of the best everyday sources. They don’t contain vitamin A itself but beta-carotene (the orange pigment), which the body converts as it needs. One medium carrot gives more than a day’s worth for most adults.

Myth: “Eat enough gajar and you’ll throw away your glasses”

Glasses correct the shape of the eye. In short sight, which is the most common reason school children end up in specs, the eyeball is just a little too long from front to back, so the picture comes into focus slightly in front of the screen instead of on it, and no vegetable, oil, almond or eye exercise changes the length of an eyeball. None.

Once your body has enough vitamin A, it simply stores the extra, mostly in the liver, and converts less beta-carotene. More carrots don’t mean more vision. Eat a mountain of them and the main thing you’ll notice is slightly orange palms and soles (carotenaemia), which is harmless and fades when you eat fewer.

We go through the other nazar tez totkay in nazar ki kamzori and eyesight myths.

What helps your eyes, in practice

Habits beat foods.

1. Eat colour most days. Half a cup of carrots, a katori of palak or saag, or a slice of ripe mango or papaya covers vitamin A for the day.
2. Add a little fat. Beta-carotene dissolves in fat, so a teaspoon of oil or ghee in the cooking helps the body take it up. That’s why gajar with a bit of tarka makes sense, and we explain it in fat with vegetables, from saag to gajar.
3. Cook some, eat some raw. Light cooking softens the walls of the carrot cells and frees more beta-carotene.
4. Rest screen-tired eyes. Every 20 minutes, look at something about 6 metres away for 20 seconds.
5. Test, don’t guess. A proper eye test every 1 to 2 years, yearly for people with diabetes.

Buying good gajar for halwa or salad is its own art; see how to pick sweet desi carrots.

Surprising carrot facts

Carrots weren’t always orange, either. Early cultivated carrots were purple and yellow, and the purple-black kind still grows across Pakistan and north India for kanji. The deep colour there comes from different pigments, but they’re still a good vegetable.

Also, too much vitamin A as preformed vitamin A (from supplements or large amounts of liver) can be harmful, especially in pregnancy. Beta-carotene from carrots doesn’t carry that risk, because the body only converts what it needs.

When to see a doctor or eye specialist

• Trouble seeing at dusk or in dim rooms, especially in a child or a pregnant woman. That may be vitamin A deficiency and needs checking.
• A child squinting, sitting close to the TV, or rubbing eyes a lot.
• Blurred vision that doesn’t clear on blinking.
• Dry, wrinkled-looking whites of the eyes or foamy grey spots on them in a child.

Go the same day for sudden loss of vision, a curtain across part of your sight, a painful red eye with blurring, or flashes with a shower of new floaters.

Browse more food claims, sorted into fact and fiction, in Fact or Myth.

Carrots and eyesight: what people ask