Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Carrots and Your Eyes

Episode Date: August 26, 2020

Join Chuck and Josh as they learn that one of the great childhood truths – that carrots help you see better in the dark was totally made up! Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh, there's Chuck, and this is short stuff. It's the shortest of the stuffs.

I think, I believe I'm right. You ever heard the old kids song, Carrots, carrots, good for your heart. The more you eat, the better your eyes. No, who wrote that? I did, just now. Oh, okay. That's fine then, if it was off the cuff,

but I mean, man, if that went through like a focus group or something. You like carrots? Oh, I love carrots. As a matter of fact, researching this, I ate two raw carrots while I was reading. I eat raw carrots all the time, like with the skins on and everything.

Oh, you don't need to do a little peel, huh? No, no. Just wash them up? Sometimes. No, you should watch them. You know, they come out of the dirt. I know, but so I've read, and I think we talked about,

there's this idea that vegetarians don't get some sort of like beneficial bacteria because the vegetables are so well rinsed and washed in the United States, and there's something in the dirt that is helpful, but I mean. Yeah, I mean, when I wash my potatoes and carrots and stuff,

I don't do like the brush scrub or anything like that. I just give them a good sort of hand rinse. Right. So I'm sure I'm getting some good dirt in there. Yeah, you wanna get it under your fingernails and then lick it out from under your fingernails. That's the healthiest way. So we're talking about carrots though

because of the old adage that carrots are good for your eyes, and here's the deal, and we'll talk kind of all about this. Carrots are good for your eyes, but they're not like a cure if you have anything other than a vitamin A deficiency, which is why your eyes may be going bad.

Right, and even if you already have like a problem from vitamin A deficiency, they're not necessarily going to reverse the issue, but from what I can tell, carrots are a really good preventative for vitamin A deficiency related eye issues. And we'll talk about how that works in a second, but first, Chuck, I wanna tell you,

when I was younger, we used to have a great neighborhood for playing things like kick the can. And I remember specifically explaining to some of my friends that I was playing with, that I was able to see them so clearly at night because I ate a bunch of carrots, like I've always eaten carrots.

And I meant that as sincerely as I've ever said anything in my life. And I just yesterday figured out that I was totally full of it and didn't realize it. And when one of the other boys shoved you, you said that your dad was gonna sue their family for all the money they had. I don't think I've ever said that in my life, thankfully.

I always was like, that's lame. Yeah, you were the only eight-year-old going, well, that's called a frivolous lawsuit, my friend. Tort reform now. So yeah, that might have been a carryover for you from this story from World War II in the UK. Apparently the British Royal Air Force had a story they published about the fighter pilot,

John Cat-sized Cunningham, who they could thank for his diet of carrots, for the fact that he was so good at night in these dogfights that he would get into at night. And so people drank it up. They grew carrots. And it turns out it was all sort of a false story cooked up for propaganda sake to cover up their radar technology.

Yeah, they didn't want everybody to know that they were using radar. So they said, there's this guy who's eating so many carrots that he can see German bombers at night. You know what they really said? What? They said, hey, old boy, what do you think about just dangling you

as the old carrot as it were? Oh man, that was good. I think we should also specify, his nickname wasn't cat size. It was cat's eyes. He wasn't like the size of a cat. Yeah, C-A-T-S apostrophe. E-Y-E, not C-A-T-S-I-Z-E.

Cause that's what it sounded like at first. I got you cat size. Cat's eyes. He's a cutest darn little chintz-a-sliin' pilot. Oh boy, that's good. So that's totally made up. It's British propaganda, and you don't actually see better in the dark

from eating carrots. They were just covering up radar use. That's one of the best things I've ever learned in my entire life. I love that fact. That's just wonderful. But it does not mean that carrots aren't good for your eyes.

And we're going to describe how carrots are good for your eyes after a break. How about that, Chuck? Sounds great. Much, much. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slipdresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist?

So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Which episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s? Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Oh God. Seriously, I swear.

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Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Okay, boy, that was a great first half, if you ask me, Chuck. Yeah, and you know what? I want to applaud you for not eating baby carrots. Well, I hear they're bleached. They're bleached. And they're also, I think the story is that it's a very wasteful thing, right?

The process. Oh, I don't know. Is it? I mean, I think so. You can just look at a baby carrot, and where does the rest of the stuff go? I thought that they were made from carrots that didn't pass mustard to be sold normally, and then they just kind of whittled it down. But yeah, I guess that would be a waste, because most of the carrot that wouldn't, most of

the produce that doesn't get sold is just cosmetic. I think we talked about food waste before like that, didn't we? Yeah. And you know what? I tried to buy one of those the other day. The grocer was laying out lemons, and he had one that didn't look good. He said it to the side, and I said, can I have that one? And he said, no.

He said, but it looks just like a blinkin'. He goes, I know. I'm going to sell it on eBay. All right. So, I'm going to take issue with that guy, and we should do a short stuff on what's the deal with baby carrots once we figure that out, too. All right, for sure, for sure. But yeah, I don't eat baby carrots, because I have heard they're bleached.

Although I must admit, I've never done the actual research. It was enough to put me off of it. And you're a grown-up. Yeah, that's true. I like man-sized stuff. So, beta-carotene is sort of the big ingredient. That is the pigment, and not just in carrots, but in a lot of things like sweet potatoes, a lot of orange things, I think it's not one of the melons rich with beta-carotene.

Canaloupe? I've never heard of that one. That's funny. Yeah. You're kidding, right? Yeah. Okay. But it could have been one of those things that you'd never seen written out before,

you know? Like facetious? Sure. I don't even know how to spell that. F-A-C-E-T-I-O-U-S. Yeah, it looks like facetious or something. Yeah, facetious or something. Or what's the one you used to get wrong on the time?

Oh, deleterious. Deleterious. It's deleterious. Deleterious. So, beta-carotene is this pigment. It's in a lot of orange fruits and veggies, and it is rich with vitamin A. And we've already discussed vitamin A is in the developing world, vitamin A, if you don't have enough of it, it is a leading cause of blindness.

There are some other conditions that a lack of vitamin A can cause with the eyes, one called xerothalamia, where you don't produce tears, you have a lot of dryness, obviously. Your eyelids can swell, and you can get ulcers in your cornea. It sounds awful. It does. And then also macular degeneration, which is a problem everywhere. It's like one of the main causes people lose their vision as they age, but from what I've read, it's not just a natural, normal outcome of aging.

You can prevent it. And one of the ways that you can prevent it or stave it off is from eating plenty of carrots or eating plenty of foods that are rich in beta-carotene, because I don't think we've said it yet. Beta-carotene is a precursor to vitamin A. We eat things like carrots that contain beta-carotene, and our bodies go, and turn it into vitamin A, and go, here you go, use some of this, and your eyes pack it in the macula, and it fortifies it against macular degeneration. That's right.

And we mentioned sweet potatoes and the cantaloupe, but also, of course, mango. You got your pumpkin. You got your apricot. Most of those orange-colored foods except for oranges, I don't think oranges. Yeah, they don't have beta-carotene, I don't think. That is just stupid. I know. What do you do in orange?

Some milk apparently has it, so a lot of cheeses have it, egg yolks have it. Liver has it. Liver has everything. I think because it's just everything gets stuck in the liver, so you're ingesting everything right then. I'm not a big liver fan either, although I do love a good pâté, but I wouldn't eat like just a grilled liver or something like that. It'd fall through the greats, I think, on a grill, wouldn't it?

Yeah, I mean, that's where I go south with any survival competition. I love those shows, but I don't know. I mean, maybe if it was life and death, I could bring myself to it, but eating in trails and livers and brains and stuff, just very, very tough for me. Not a sweet bread fan, huh? No, and that's a terrible name for that stuff. There's that footnote in our book about sweet breads being the greatest culinary euphemism of all time because those things are not, that's just about as great as it comes for

that kind of thing because it's like the thalamus or something or the thyroid gland and the pancreas, I think. I think you're referring to our book that you can pre-order now, right? Yeah, stuff you should know, colon, an incomplete compendium of mostly interesting things which can be pre-ordered everywhere in the world right now. Yeah, go read those footnotes. They're a lot of fun. Yeah, they are.

So, where are we? We are basically at the point where I think we kind of wrap this up, Chuck, because we've talked about beta-carotene being important. We've talked about vitamin A, and then I guess we should also mention lutein, lutein's an antioxidant that's also found in carrots, which makes carrots even more potent health-wise. That really kind of helps prevent macular degeneration, too. Yeah, I think they increase your pigment density, and the macula is where that happens, and the macula, you always hear about macular degeneration, but that's the little oval yellow

area near the retina. Yes, and when that goes, you can't see so well, so you want to keep that healthy. So basically, I think what we're trying to say is go out, pre-order our book, and then while you do, eat some raw carrots, but not the baby kind. Yeah, eat raw carrots, and then if you want more lutein, you can also eat dark leafy greens and kale and swiss chard and stuff like that. And don't forget our book, and since I said that, Chuck, I think short stuff is out, don't you?

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