Surfeit Of Carrots Has A Side Effect

Press, Volume C, Issue 29517, 19 May 1961, Page 6

Surfeit Of Carrots Has A Side Effect

I Bv

GRAHAM KING)

In America recently, a worried, middle-aged woman woke up one morning to find that her skin had turned an orange-yellow. The initial reaction of the doctor she called in was that she had jaundice—until he noticed that the whites of her eyes were not affected. The doctor began to probe deeper into the trouble. He asked her about her diet. And then she revealed that for the last few years she had acquired a habit of drinking approximately two pints of tomato juice each day The doctor’s patient had unwittingly written herself into medical history books. She had become the first recorded case of lycopenaemia —tomato disease. On the face of it, no food could seem more innocuous than garden vegetables. But now doctors are beginning to realise that you can have too much of a good thing. • Tomatoes are a case in point. The colour in them—and in certain other vegetables. too—is caused by a pigment called lycopene. If someone drinks too much of the juice, the body is unable to cope with all the lycopene and the excess finds its way into the bloodstream, producing a different skin colour. A similar illness was already known. This was carotanaemia. caused as its name suggests, by eating too many carrots. Carrots are coloured by carotene, a pigment chemically like lycopene. and the symptoms were almost the same—a golden skin, but unaffected eye whites. Carotenaemia was first observed in 1907, but it has always been a fairly rare condition, and, as far as is known, neither it nor lycopenaemia. is dangerous. In Britain during World War 11. when carrots were abundant and everyone was being urged to eat them, several advanced cases were recorded. One of these was a baby to whom it was passed through its mother’s milk. Carrot Addict Carotene colours other vegetables besides carrots, and carotenaemia may result from eating large quantities of spinach, palm oil, nettles or paw paw over long periods. In India there have been frequent cases of carotenaemia due to indiscreet paw paw consumption. Carotenaemia and lycopenaemia usually fade away If the offending diet is stopped. However, some patients become so addicted to their beloved vegetable that they would sympathise with one English woman who said she would rather be yellow and have her pound of carrots a day than pale and carrotless.

Another person, a hotel cook, had reached the point of existing almost exclusively on carrots alone, eating 11 to 21b a day. raw. However, she managed to tear herself away from them and now has a normal diet and a normal colour. One fact that emerged from a recent medical study of carotenaemia is that most of the patients have been women, with middle-aged spread. and “nerves." The body colour of any human being depends on four factors: the pigments in his skin, which are responsible for racial differences: the thickness of his skin: the speed at which the blood flows through his skin capdiaries; and the colour of h>s blood. Only True "White" Abnormalities in any of these factors produce an abnormally coloured person. The absence of skin pigments. for instance, produces an albino, who is incidentally. the only true “white" human and may belong to any race. But it is the blood colour which is affected in the vegetable diseases. Blood has two main components, red cells and plasma. Its normal colour depends on the haemoglobin in the red cells, which Is red when it carries oxygen, blue when it does not. However, strangely - coloured blood appears when the red cells suffer under certain abnormal circumstances. Perhaps the most dramatic is carbon monoxide poisoning where the haemoglobin carries carbon monoxide instead of oxygen. Then the blood, and therefore the Skin, turns bright cherry pink. In a few rare cases, drugs such as phenacitin and the sulphonamides can also affect the blood colour. So can contact with fresh aniline dyes, or even drinking water containing nitrates. In all these cases, a bluish skin results But the vegetable dyes affect the other main component of blood: plasma. Plasma is normally a transparent liquid, palest yellow in colour. But when somebody eats too many carrots, the surplus pigment turns the plasma bright yellow. A yellow colour is also produced by excess bile pigments, which are caused by jaundice. And this is where the importance of carotenaemia and lycopenaemia lies. They are not particularly serious in themselves, but jaundice may be, and so it is important for doctors to be able to distinguish between them. But human beings are not the only creatures affected by the colour of vegetables they eat. Cows on a diet of beetroot produce pink milk! —'Central Press. All Rights Reserved.)