You may have heard from your grandma that eating carrots can improve you vision. That may not be exactly true, but carrots do contain something called provitamin A carotenoids. These are pigments in some plants that can be converted by the body into vitamin A, and vitamin A is important to your vision.
Vitamin A is also helpful to bone growth and your immune system. As with other vitamins, there are different forms of vitamin A. One of the forms that is most usable to the body is called retinol, and it can be found in liver, eggs, and milk. One of the most common provitamin A carotenoids that the body converts easily to retinol is beta carotene, and it is found in carrots, sweet potatoes, spinach, and cantaloupe. Vitamin A is also one of the vitamins often used to fortify breakfast cereals.
Vitamin A is fat soluble, which means that the body stores it, mostly in the liver. That also means that it is possible to build up toxic levels of it in the body. This rarely happens from food sources because as the body builds up supplies of vitamin A, it will slow down the processing of beta carotene conversion to vitamin A. When people do get vitamin A toxicity, it is...