Jump To: Carrots Help Eyesight | Optometrists: Carrots | Carrot Alternatives | Other Approaches | Carrot Eyes Infographic

This article is sourced in part from our evidence based, science category.

Carrots.

I’ve been telling our thousands of members in our BackTo20/20 program for the past decade, to get some carrots into their diet.

And diet isn’t really my primary area. Helping your eyesight get better is my area however, so I cover a tiniest bit of food and nutrition. Because if you want to fix your eyesight, reverse your myopia, you want to understand what causes your eyesight to be bad in the first place. Which diet does play some role in – but only if you are actually nutrient deficient.

Let’s start here: The biggest mistake in trying to fix anything, is to skip the question of “why is it broken in the first place”.

Read that again. Hint – the start of your eyesight problems is this little muscle in your eyeball:

Do Carrots Help Your Eyesight?

The short answer is … somewhat and maybe. Read on for the deep dive.

The ‘kinda’ part in particular here, is beta-carotene. Which the body converts into retinol, aka. vitamin A.

24 second video summary:

And let’s take a little detour right here. We’re living in a bit of a vitamin craze in general. We’re happily sold this fantasy that popping a pill or eating this-and-that already tasty thing, will fix our bodies. It’s a giant industry, it’s incredibly profitable, and people love it of course. You don’t have to do anything really, no hard work, no learning, no habit changes, no personal accountability, no commitments.

Pop this here pill little buddy, yeaaaaa. That’s all you need. And your credit card number, of course.

The two real questions are this:

Are you actually deficient in vitamin A?

Is that (maybe) vitamin A deficiency causing your squinty-face, glasses-needing situation in the first place?

Answer to the first question is, maybe. The only way to know for sure is to do a blood panel for vitamins and minerals. Which is a good idea in general just to find out what you might be running short on anyway. Barring that, vitamin A is not water soluble, so you can actually ‘overdose’ on it. Which can have all sorts of negative consequences.

You’re probably not going to overdose on actual carrots though. Unless you’re going all OCD on carrots.

Adding some carrot to your diet in general, is fine. Note too (so many notes) that mostly carrots grown in today’s industrial fertilizer world, are actually often quite low in nutrients. Not to go back towards making you carrot-overdose, but still a reality that we’re generally getting less nutrient dense food because of the way it’s grown.

Bla bla Jake, you’re thinking. I didn’t want a history of all the kings of old timey France and the story of the carrot.

Ok, fine. Do carrots help your eyesight? Actually, mainly just for night vision.

Vitamin A is integral to the synthesis of rhodopsin, a light-sensitive pigment located in the rod cells of the retina. Rhodopsin consists of retinal (a derivative of vitamin A) bound to a protein called opsin. A deficiency in vitamin A leads to decreased levels of rhodopsin, resulting in night blindness, characterized by difficulty seeing in low-light conditions.

So among many other functions, vitamin A can help eyesight. Carrots contain beta-carotene which your gut converts into Vitamin A.

Buy a few carrots when you go grocery shopping. 3-5 a week of carrot goodness, let’s call it insurance. You won’t overdo vitamin A, you don’t have to go out get stuck by a needle and face a full story of vitamin and mineral deficiencies (though you should maybe), and whatever you might be low in on vitamin A, you’ll get more of.

You can also get preformed Vitamin A from animal products such as liver, fish, and dairy. This form is readily usable by the body.

But, does a lack of carrot-face-stuffing or liver-eating actually cause bad eyesight?

The answer to that is a resounding no.

Vitamin A, retinol, carrots, none of them have any primary effect on blurry vision, aka. nearsightedness, aka myopia.

So a bit of full circle here: If you want to help your eyesight, you need to understand what’s wrong in the first place. I made a short video series to explain the whole story, from biology to questionable glasses, to profit motives.

It’s well worth the few minutes of your time. Check it here. You’ll find a whole lot more answers than just carrots.

Summary:

- Vitamin A is the key nutrient specific to helping night vision
- Checking for deficiencies is the best first step
- Carrots are an ideal source of vitamin A
- Myopia (nearsightedness) is not caused by a vitamin deficiency

Do Optometrists Believe Carrots Help Your Eyesight?

We interact a lot with optometrists here at endmyopia.

In fact a lot of our thousands of eyesight improvement member updates include optometrist confirmed improved eyesight.

On a whole, optometrists we talk to don’t recommend carrots to their customers.

The retail optometry treatment is simple and addresses the focal plane issue that has your eyesight blurry. It’s a fast and effective approach.

Jaded? Perhaps.

Their primary recommendation is of course glasses and contact lenses, which addresses most people’s vision problems. In the case of preventing worsening eyesight, they discuss a number of other alternatives that are sold commercially. More on that below

If you want to go much further than carrots helping your eyesight, you want to look at that last one. Hyperopic and myopic defocus. those are the two scientific and biological factors that actually contribute to the vast majority of your good – or bad, vision.

The general consensus is that diet plays a role, but not the primary one.

Summary

- Eye care specialists generally don’t recommend vitamins
- Primary ‘treatment’ for bad eyesight is corrective lenses
- Hyperopic defocus is the primary cause of worsening eyesight

Products: Helping Prevent Worsening Eyesight

There are a number of commercial products available, geared at preventing worsening eyesight.

We have written a lot about all of these products over the years. If you want to stop your eyes from getting worse, these are basically the options you’ll find at your retail optometrist.

Ortho-k: Orthokeratology, commonly known as ortho-k, is a non-surgical vision correction method that involves wearing specially designed gas-permeable contact lenses overnight. This process temporarily reshapes the cornea, allowing individuals to see clearly during the day without the need for glasses or conventional contact lenses. Comes with significant long term risks.
Atropine: Atropine eye drops are an ophthalmic medication primarily used for dilating the pupils and treating various eye conditions, including slowing myopia progression. Also risky, click the atropine link for more.
Defocus ring lenses (that’s somewhat promising): efocus ring technology is an innovative approach in myopia management that utilizes specialized lens designs to create peripheral defocus, which has been shown to slow the progression of myopia (nearsightedness). Least side effects out of all of these, and the same premise as used in endmyopia’s differential glasses approach.

There is not anywhere online you’ll get more information about all available myopia treatment options, than right here.

We have hundreds of thousands of participants, community members, reviewers and fellow myopes. Between the discussion of science, testing available methods and long term feedback, you get every possible nuance and answer about myopia control right here.

What Else Can Help Your Eyesight?

We have written a great deal on the subject of vision health.

We have many thousands of first hand reports of improved eyesight.

The discussion of helping eyesight improve always comes down to the same two factors. Strain and stimulus.

You are experiencing excessive eye strain from your many hours of spending time up close every single day. This is significantly compounded if you’re wearing distance lenses while in close-up mode. Combined with this strain which causes your eye’s focusing muscle to spasm (locking it into close-up mode), you’re lacking the stimulus necessary to 1) reverse the spasm and 2) have the necessary stimulus to reverse the effects of hyperopic defocus.

That’s the real meat of the topic of helping your eyesight.

It’s a topic that requires a bit of study to truly understand. If you haven’t watched my video series on what’s going on, here’s the first part:

Since this is an article about carrots, we won’t go full deep dive on the general eyesight topic here.

Hopefully you did get the two important answers.

First, the one you asked for.

So do carrots help your eyesight? Not in a way that by itself will make a meaningful difference.

Second, the implied question is, what helps your eyesight? The number one recommendation you get here is not wearing distance glasses while looking at screens. Remember, hyperopic defocus. It elongates your eyeballs and is the main contributor to worsening vision.

Summary

- Close-up eye strain is the main source of worsening vision
- Poor eyesight is a ciliary muscle spasm initially
- Distance lenses worn during close-up cause long term worsening vision

Save / Share Factsheet: Carrots For Eyesight

On endmyopia Twitter: Do carrots help your eyesight?

Medical Review / Sources

Endmyopia follows strict sourcing guidelines and relies on peer-reviewed studies, academic research institutions, and medical journals and associations. We only use quality, credible sources to ensure content accuracy and integrity while discussing eyesight.

Mainstream optometry failing at myopia control. The reasons, problems, lack of education.

https://hrbopenresearch.org/articles/2-30

Eyesight, eyeball axial length.

https://iovs.arvojournals.org/article.aspx?articleid=2126435

Myopia control lenses.

https://coopervision.com.my/contact-lenses/misight-1-day

Axial myopia progression in children.

https://www.aaojournal.org/article/S0161-6420(10)01154-1/abstract