Two Facts and A Myth: Vitamin A

“Two Facts and A Myth” is a series of nutrition topics that you can share at the dinner table, around the water cooler, or in line at a coffee shop. This series will bust popular misconceptions about nutrition while highlighting little-known facts. For this week, we will focus on Vitamin A.

Fact Vitamin A is important to your eyesight.

Vitamin A takes part in several key steps that allow us to see. The retina (the inner part of the eye) uses vitamin A to convert light into visual signals that are sent to the brain. So, carrots may not make your vision better, but they (and other foods with vitamin A) are important to eyesight.

Fact Vitamin A deficiency causes night blindness.

Night blindness is when your eyes have difficulty adapting from bright light to darkness. To treat night blindness, clinicians have prescribed diets rich in vitamin A to patients. This practice has been used for centuries. The first known treatment dates back to Hippocrates’ advice to the ancient Egyptians and Greeks. (more…)