How Good Is Your Night Vision?

This is for you if you eat a mainly plant-based diet and don’t have good night vision, or you know someone in that category. It’s also for you if you’re interested in science, you like cats or a bit of horror.

We need vitamin A for vision, for healthy body surfaces such as our eyes, lungs, digestive tract, bladder, and for our immune system to function well, among other things.

One of the early signs of vitamin A deficiency is, in fact, night blindness. This means in dim light we can’t see.

You’ve probably heard that carrots are good for your vision. Indeed, if you do an internet search on foods containing vitamin A, you get a list of vegetables like carrots and spinach, sweet potatoes and tomatoes. You also get liver, milk, eggs among other animal products.

In actual fact, vitamin A isn’t found in vegetables at all. It’s beta-carotene that the plant kingdom makes, not vitamin A. Vitamin A is only found in animal products.

Beta-carotene is a bigger molecule for starters. It’s twice the size of vitamin A. To get vitamin A from beta-carotene, our body has to convert one to the other.

For one molecule of beta-carotene, we get two molecules of retinal, which then gets converted to vitamin A.

This sounds good, doesn’t it? Two for the price of one. It’s like a BOGOF — Buy One Get One Free — offer in the plant kingdom.

Ah, not so fast. In some people, this conversion doesn’t work too well.

The conversion of beta-carotene to vitamin A occurs thanks to an enzyme called beta-carotene monooxygenase, which is encoded by the gene…

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