Carrots help you see in the dark.
Well, this is not strictly true as it turns out. According to Ben Goldacre, in his excellent book, Bad Science, carrots were the source of one of the most successful disinformation campaigns of World War Two.
It was during the Battle of Britain (in which our chaps were outnumbered four to one). The German High Command could not understand how the RAF pilots could see the planes of the Luftwaffe coming from such huge distances. This was because of a fancy new British invention called Radar. To stop the Germans trying to work out if we'd invented anything clever like that, the British government instead started an elaborate and entirely made-up nutritionist campaign. The basic premise was that Carotenes in carrots are transported to the eye and converted to retinal (the molecule that detects light in the eye) and the entirely false conclusion was that carrots make you see in the dark.
So, went the story, doubtless with much chortling behind their excellent RAF moustaches, we have been feeding our chaps huge plates of carrots, to jolly good effect.
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