I remember there was a Magic School Bus episode when I was a kid about how eating too many carrots would turn your skin orange. Never occurred to me that that’s also the color used for fake tans
According to the experience of a friend, eating 1kg carrots a day makes your skin go slightly orange. You’ll likely notice only in places where the skin is thin and white. For example around your knuckles when you form your hand into a fist.
experts suggest you would need to eat at least ten carrots per day, for at least a few weeks, for colour changes to occur. Most people would find this carrot intake challenging.
Yeah, I’d say so. One carrot is already an almost insurmountable challenge to me 🤢
10 carrots is something like 1.5-2 pounds/0.75-1 kg. I can eat a good bit of carrot-ginger soup, but a quart of soup every day for weeks? I think I’d have other health effects before I started glowing orange.
Can they invent a few more of these kinds of Tik Tok trends?
The kind where they’re tricked into doing something healthy and harmless? I imagine an army of troll nutritionists thinking up new challenges :)
I think getting healthy and harmless trends from tiktok that make people stand out by making them glow orange is also a nice touch, that way it’s easier to avoid people that fall for tiktok trends.
It’s 3 carrots a day and the skin color is harmless (other than not actually protecting against UV but that’s, like, not worse than not doing it) so it’s actually quite positive. As long as they don’t think they can suddenly skip sunscreen, …
I actually had this happen to me as a little kid. I had to go to the hospital because they needed to check if I was jaundiced. Turned out it was just that my favorite foods are carrots and squash. Eating more vegetables isn’t a bad thing.
Eating too much of anything is bad for you. Carrots are only a problem if someone is trying to diet and allows themselves infinite vegetables because vegetables are healthy though. Which is a silly thing to do.
Any extra beta-carotene is then either stored in the liver and fat tissue, excreted through poo, or removed via sweat glands in the outer layer of the skin. This is when the orange skin “tan” can happen. In medicine, this is called carotenoderma.
Carotenoderma gives your skin a yellow/orange pigment that is not the same colour you’d turn from a sun tan. It is concentrated in the palms of the hands, the soles of the feet and smile lines near the nose.
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