WWII Propaganda Popularized Myth That Carrots Help You See in the Dark (2013) | Hacker News Reader

WWII Propaganda Popularized Myth That Carrots Help You See in the Dark (2013)

smithsonianmag.com

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Seriously I really believed this thing: back in the days when I was practicing Ninjutsu I ate carrots 2 times a day!

I always thought that it didn't work just because you needed a few years of carrots eating to get results.

Now I feel fooled and by a 75 yo fake news at that!

You were also suckered into the ninja fad.

It was the turtles, wasn't it?

Now I want to turn into anti-carrot lobbyist, as this was a ploy to increase carrot consumption through fake news propaganda. My father had me eat so many carrots because he fell for fake news :( Now if I only know who propaganda'd that neem leaves puree helps purify blood. One of the worst memories of my childhood, they are so insanely bitter.

Hopefully more will be wary of the leeks of Julienne Assange.

As a child my parents would tell me to not sit so close to the TV as it'd ruin my eyesight. I concocted some sort of wacky formula for how many carrots I needed per unit of time sitting close to the TV.

It turns out that I have excellent eyesight, the only one in the family who doesn't wear glasses. If it weren't so ridiculous I'd actually wonder a bit about the effect my formula had.

So, what's the formula? :)

Might work for people with children, have the kids pay for computer time with carrots LOL

I wish I could remember although considering I recall one of the components involved me visualizing time as decrementing hourglass-y down the hallway which lined up with where I was sitting I'm thinking it wasn't particularly rigorous.

This is a technique that I actually do use with my 4-year-old. He can "buy" extra time to stay up reading (2 baby carrots), 3 extra games of splatoon (7 baby carrots), and so on.

I think this may be parent speak for "stop blocking the goddamn TV". Kids often lack the awareness of what's around them, some can stand a foot in front of the TV in a room with a dozen other people watching it and not realize they're blocking it. This along with the general excitability, it may just be easier to tell kids it's dangerous to sit that close.

My parents told me that. It turned out I was already very short sighted and couldn't see clearly across an entire room. Until I was 5 I just thought everyone else was putting up with blurry tv.

Ninjutsu? Did you practice horsemanship, espionage, or impersonation? I'm serious (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninjutsu#The_eighteen_skills). Were live horses and stables involved? Were there method acting lessons? How did this work?

I can imagine a complete school would be fascinating, rare (given the amount of land required) and quite an achievement. Is there an organization analogous to say Hombu (http://www.aikikai.or.jp/eng/information/ ... essentially the Vatican City of Aikido)?

It amuses me to see this pop up from time-to-time in movies and TV.

"And what's with all the carrots? What do they need such good eyesight for anyway? Bunnies! bunnies! It must be bunnies!!"

"Or maybe midgets?"

+1 for your Anya/Buffy reference alone.

My first-born is named Anya.

Fake "science". Vitamin A deficiency most definitely can cause night blindness. In the event you suffer from a deficiency, carrots most definitely can address it. I have personal experience with this. I couldn't see anything at all in low light, so I took up drinking fresh carrot juice in significant quantities, and within two weeks it was like a dark curtain had been withdrawn from before my eyes.

I have doubts that eating a carrot a day would do a whole lot of good, but I can tell you that 8 ounces of fresh carrot juice a day definitely does!

I gave semi high dose lutein (45mg per day) a try as I noticed my eyes weakening (early problems with long-distance vision, night vision). Helped substantially, took maybe two months to have a noticeable effect though.

Would you recommend this for people with established short-sightedness? I'm always worried about my eyes getting worse, and they have been, year after year.

> I'm always worried about my eyes getting worse, and they have been, year after year.

Sometimes people's vision prescriptions are too strong. I started going to a 'developmental optometrist' about 12 years ago. While I don't see 20/20 with my current glasses, I tried stronger lenses from a conventional optometrist 7 years ago and found them intolerable. When he wanted to charge me for another office visit for the contact prescription, I just ordered the prescription I wanted from an internet contacts store.

How do you order from an online contacts store, without a valid doctors prescription? I've worn glasses since I was in kindergarten, and contacts since I was seventeen. Never have I been able to order contacts online, without a doctors prescription. They expire within a year typically.

Not all companies in all countries are quite so rigorous about checking for current valid prescriptions as others.

In addition, many countries don't have prescription requirements for contact lenses at all, so there is nothing to check.

Yikes.

Why Yikes? I mean, yes, contacts have a higher risk of getting infections etc compared to glasses, but that's not really fixed by yearly check-ups. And a pair of glasses can be good for 5-10 years if your eyesight is stable.

I guess if you just start using them you'd want an expert advising you, making sure everything goes correctly?

Yep, never heard of needing a contact lens prescription to order them before. Here in New Zealand you can just order them online from Canada for cheap. So I suspect Canada is the same.

Look around.

Many sites let you just punch in the numbers. The downside is that you need to make frame adjustments yourself or go somewhere to do it.

If there was some existing anecdotal reports of carrots/vitamin A giving you better night vision, I'd think it'd make an even better cover story than something more outlandish.

Maybe in this case they just happened to accidentally cook up a cover story with a grain of truth to it?

Amazing that MI5's shills are still at it!

(/s)

I think the takeaway is that for anyone who is not vitamin A deficient, eating carrots will do nothing.

Vitamin A deficiency certainly causes poor night vision because the body cannot produce rhodopsin. But no amount of beta carotene will make normal night vision better, and therefore the article is not fake science at all.

>I think the takeaway is that for anyone who is not vitamin A deficient, eating carrots will do nothing.

I imagine that vitamin-A deficiency must have occurred rather frequently under WWII rationing. Perhaps this was a real concern at the time?

Vitamin A deficiency is surprisingly common today.

An interesting story about Eduard Schwarz, an early doctor/researcher (plus much about vitamin A) is at:

http://www.westonaprice.org/health-topics/abcs-of-nutrition/...

An Excerpt:

"Eduard Schwarz (1831-1862), a ship’s doctor on an Austrian frigate that was sent around the world on a scientific exploration. Before his departure from Vienna, several physicians had asked Schwartz to test the old folk remedy of boiled ox liver against night blindness. On the voyage, 75 of the 352 men developed the condition. Every evening when dusk came, they lost their vision and had to be led about like the blind. Schwartz fed them ox or pork liver and found that the night vision in all of the afflicted was restored."

More about Schwarz:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0899900797...

Should you want to test yourself, a teaspoon of cod liver oil should do the trick. Animal-based versions of vitamin A seem to be more efficacious than their vegetable analogs.

Meanwhile eat your liver(mmmm!), fish, carrots and blueberries.

I have experienced reduced night vision to a degree while driving at night. I now take cod liver oil capsules (for other reasons), and have no trouble at all now.

The Blitz happened in 1940. At this time, the German rations were pretty much the least constrictive of major world powers--certainly better off than the UK ration situation.

Germany didn't suffer majorly in food resources until 1944, when it lost the ability to strip France, Ukraine, and Poland of food for its home front. Obviously, if you weren't German, you had a much harder time getting your daily calories, but we're discussing in context of the Blitz, and soldiers in wartime invariably get much higher rations than the general populace.

A personal anecdote based on subjective evaluation of your night vision isn't science.

WWII Propaganda Popularized the Myth That the US and not the soviets defeated the nazi army.

This story, and the UFO stories from the 50s and 60s, demonstrate the enduring power of a well-crafted cover story.

Long after the real secret information is widely known (radar and experimental aircraft), the cover stories are still widely believed.

This still doesn't explain why I've never seen a rabbit wearing glasses.

Well, I still love carrot almond halwa :)

One of the best sweets ever. In Punjab, we majorly use buffalo milk, and my grandma used to feed one of the buffalos special diet of "varhevein" (mustard seed pith cake after de-oiling), then the milk underwent process of "kaarhni", essentially slow boiling over an afternoon which gives it a very unique taste akin to smokey BBQ. We used fresh carrots for the halwa, and make it on open pit in a cast iron pan. No recipe or method has come closer to that. Insanely rich sweet.

That sounds delicious!

My parents made me LOVE carrots as a kid in the early 90s by promising that they would grant me this super human power of night vision and damnit I bought into it hook, line, and sinker. I'm not sure if carrots would be my favourite vegetable today if it wasn't for this propaganda.

How about cannabis then?

http://hightimes.com/medicinal/new-study-suggests-cannabis-i...

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