The Best Time To Eat Carrots for Vitamin A and Eye Health

Carrots offer numerous health benefits, with one of the most significant being their promotion of eye health. When you choose to eat carrots, they can play a role in how easily your body absorbs their nutrients and can reap these benefits.

Eat Carrots With Healthy Fats for Maximum Beta-Carotene Absorption

Eat your carrots at the same time as a meal or snack containing fats to get the most eye health benefits.

Carrots get their signature bright orange color from beta-carotene, an antioxidant pigment that your body converts into vitamin A when it’s digested. Vitamin A is a fat-soluble vitamin. This means that you’ll absorb it best when eating it alongside fats, and particularly unsaturated “healthy” fats.

Carrots are rich in vitamin A, which supports eye health. One cup of raw carrots provides 102% of your daily value of vitamin A.

Vitamin A helps promote healthy eyes because:

• It’s an essential part of rhodopsin, a protein in the retina that responds to light and helps you see at night.
• It nourishes other parts of your eyes, such as the conjunctival membranes and cornea, keeping them lubricated.

Ideal Pairings for Absorption

Beta-carotene is fat-soluble, meaning your body will absorb more of it if you eat it with fats. Select your fats carefully, though. According to research, foods containing unsaturated fatty acids will help you absorb beta-carotene better than foods containing saturated fatty acids, by two to three times more.

Examples of foods with unsaturated fatty acids to eat alongside carrots include:

• Nuts and seeds
• Nut butters
• Avocado
• Eggs
• Oily fish
• Olive oil

Should You Eat Them Raw or Cooked?

Beta-carotene is more bioavailable in cooked carrots than it is in raw carrots. Bioavailability refers to the ease with which your body absorbs a specific nutrient. In other words, eating cooked carrots may help you absorb more vitamin A.

The reason that cooking helps you absorb beta-carotene is that it breaks down cell walls in the carrot, making it easier for beta-carotene to be released and then absorbed by your body. Cooking carrots in olive oil (an unsaturated fat) makes the beta-carotene even more easily absorbed.

Don’t let this deter you from enjoying raw carrots. You can still get plenty of beta-carotene from raw carrots. One trick is to chew them for longer: one study found that prolonged chewing of carrots led to a 5-6% increase in beta-carotene release.

What About Carrot Juice?

There’s evidence that carrot juice, with no added sugar, has significantly better beta-carotene bioavailability than raw carrots. This is because fiber can make it more difficult for beta-carotene to be released, and in carrot juice, the fiber is removed.

Saying that, fiber is essential to a healthy diet, and most people in the United States do not get enough fiber in their diet. Vitamin A deficiency, on the other hand, is quite rare. Even though you can get more beta-carotene (and therefore vitamin A) from carrot juice, drinking carrot juice instead of eating whole carrots is only wise if you have an otherwise fiber-rich diet.

Other Benefits of Carrots

Eye health may be the star benefit of eating carrots (or at least the most publicized), but the orange vegetable has several other benefits for your health. These include:

• Promote bone health, thanks to their potassium and vitamin K content.
• Improve digestive health and regular bowel movements due to their fiber content.
• Promote heart health and healthy blood pressure, due to their fiber and potassium content.
• Boost the immune system, thanks to vitamin C, carotenoids, polyphenols, and other vitamins they contain.
• May reduce the risk of certain cancers, due to their antioxidant content.
• Help with weight management as a low-calorie, nutritious snack.
• Contribute to skin health, due to various nutrients they contain, including vitamin C and carotenoids.
• May lower the risk of type 2 diabetes, due to their beta-carotene levels.

How Often Should You Eat Carrots?

Carrots are a healthy root vegetable that you can incorporate into your diet to increase your vitamin A intake. However, they’re not the only source of vitamin A nor, arguably, the best. Some eye health experts recommend eating spinach over carrots because it contains slightly more vitamin A and significantly less sugar.

Other foods that are high in vitamin A include:

• Beef liver
• Cantaloupe
• Herring
• Mangos
• Pumpkin
• Red peppers
• Spinach
• Sweet potato

When it comes down to how often you should eat carrots, there’s no simple answer. Try to eat a balanced diet with a variety of sources of vitamin A, rather than relying on multiple carrots every day.