Carrots Health Benefits

When you partake in a raw foods diet, you get a great variety of healthy foods in your daily meals. This is quite astray from the Standard American Diet (SAD), which already helps to improve your health and ensure you are eating better. However, you may not know all the benefits of switching to this diet and the various foods that may become staples during the diet. Carrots are a powerhouse vegetable that you will likely use in your diet daily. The health benefits of carrots are vast, ensuring that you are getting some good benefits when you add this tasty veggie to your diet. Some tout this as the perfect health food due to all the nutrition it provides.

1. They are loaded with carotenoids. Carotenoids may help protect against different types of cancer, including prostate, colon, and stomach cancers. Research on this is still fairly new, and studies are not certain of the correlation, but for anyone concerned, this is an easy way to potentially help protect your body from potential cancers.
2. Carrots have been linked to lowered cholesterol levels(1), allowing you to help improve your risk level for heart disease. This is great for those who are struggling to get their cholesterol back to where it should be or those who have a risk of heart disease in the family.
3. They are low calorie but help you to feel full longer. Carrots can be very beneficial to weight loss due to this factor where you will feel full quickly after eating them, and that fullness will last, allowing you to lessen your caloric intake each day.
4. Carrots are loaded with vitamin A, which is most beneficial for keeping your eyes healthy. Low vitamin A levels have been linked to night blindness, and this condition can be avoided by eating a healthy amount of carrots and other foods that are rich in vitamin A and carotenoids. They may also assist with macular degeneration, helping your eyes to stay healthier and younger for longer.

Does the Type of Carrot Matter?

There are lots of different carrots on the market right now, and you may be wondering if it makes a difference if you eat a long orange carrot, or a baby carrot, or even one of the purple carrot varieties. For the most part, there is no difference between the carrots and the health benefits they offer. Baby carrots are one of two types, they are either harvested while still small and then there are baby-cut carrots which are larger carrots that have been cut into smaller bite-sized pieces. There is very little nutritional difference in these, so you should still get all the same health benefits no matter which type of carrots you choose to include in your diet. When preparing your carrots for a meal, make sure to wash them thoroughly, and buy organic if at all possible to help eliminate the use of pesticides and contamination that your carrots may experience. You should also skin your carrots if you want to ensure that there is nothing on the outer skin of the carrot that could affect you or your digestive system. Skinning them is a quick and easy way to get them ready to be blended up in a juice or served as a side dish to a hummus dip.

1. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14569406/