- Sometimes it's hard to know where certain ideas come from. One such idea is how carrots help you see better in the dark. Though it may seem scientific it was actually just made up as a cover story as to why British pilots were shooting down German planes in the dark. - Carrots have beta carotene which is good for vision but it's only if you are deficient in it. It doesn't improve eyesight otherwise. - This idea is similar to how we all collectively reading the fact that humans eat eight spiders in their lifetime and also how we believe that humans require two litres of water each day. ---- Or as a more trivial example, which surprised me: I’d always believed that eating carrots helped you see better in the dark. Obviously carrots have beta carotene, which if you’re severely deficient can improve your vision. But during World War II, the British were making radar but didn’t want the Germans to know. So they had to come up with a cover story as to why these British pilots were shooting down all of these German planes in the dark. The cover story they came up with was that carrots were being eaten in vast quantities by the British pilots. And that belief just got into the culture. So how can we even find out what things we’ve been believing for bad reasons?  - [Link](https://nautil.us/who-controls-your-thoughts-498055/)