"Carrots improve your vision" is a WWII lie

[rhoenix]

Parents have been firing carrots into their kids' mouths for 70-plus years on the concept that "they give you better vision!" Truth is, while carrots are super-healthy, they won't do a thing to bring you back to 20/20. It's a myth, invented in WWII England to confuse the Nazis.

As we first explained last summer, carrots are loaded with Vitamin A, which promotes eye health—the resilience of your rods and cones. But the healthiest eyes in the world could still need inch-thick spectacles to see the chalkboard. Carrots won't change the optical deformities that make some people need glasses.

That particular misconception stems from the cover-up around the British Royal Air Force's Nazi-busting radar, as Smithsonian explains:

The Royal Air Force were able to repel the German fighters in part because of the development of a new, secret radar technology. The on-board Airborne Interception Radar (AI), first used by the RAF in 1939, had the ability to pinpoint enemy bombers before they reached the English Channel. But to keep that under wraps, according to Stolarczyk's research pulled from the files of the Imperial War Museum, the Mass Observation Archive, and the UK National Archives, the Ministry provided another reason for their success: carrots.

So keep eating carrots! They may not free you from the chains of corrective lenses, but they're healthy and delicious. And in their own small, vegetal way, they helped the Allies defeat the Nazis in WWII.

This is hilarious.

[frigidmagi]

I did not know this... All those carrots for nothing...

Well I would have likely eaten them anyways. I like carrots.

[Lys]

I thought the carrots thing was a baseless old wives tale that the Brits simply used as a convenient excuse, not that they had invented the notion. The goes my mental image of the Germans going, "Wait, wait, what my mom told me about carrots is actually true!? Does that mean I'm going grow hair on my palms and go blind?"

[Hotfoot]

The Brits were responsible for a great number of utterly amazing and hilarious bits of misinformation and counter-espionage, so I'm willing to believe this one.

[LadyTevar]

The best bit is that people BELIEVED the Brits about this. Because the Brits have this whole bamboozle where people think they have no sense of humor, a stick up their arse, and couldn't ever unbend enough to tell a joke, must less a flat-out lie. Hell, even today, News isn't NEWS, unless the BBC has covered it.