Vitamin A is an essential part of anyone’s diet, as it affects many aspects of your wellbeing. This vitamin gives you great skin, bolsters your immune system, and even improves your eyesight (which is where there ‘carrots help you see in the dark’ myth comes from). Not all vitamin A-rich vegetables are orange (and even not all the ones on this list are) but ‘going orange’ is a great place to start reaping the benefits of this vital vitamin.
Let’s start with an obvious one; carrots. When it comes to vegetables, nothing can beat this Bugs Bunny-favourite for providing nutrition to your eyes, and, along with vitamin A, the roughage in carrots will do wonders for your bowels. Throw them in a salad with green, leafy vegetables, and you’ve got two sources of vitamin A for the price of one! The fresher and darker the leaves, from vegetables such as fenugreek, mustard leaves and dandelions, the more nutritious they are. Reddish lettuce will also provide extremely high amounts of Vitamin A, and calcium if they are minimally cooked, and these leafy wonders will help you to sprout some good quality hair.
So that’s vegetables, but what about fruits? Though squash doesn’t look orange from outside, when you cut it open you’ll find a beautifully bright orange pulp staring at you. Squash is one of the richest sources of vitamin A around, and so the nutrition of this fruit is extremely important for your immunity. It’s worth seeking it out, but as it’s not widely popular you may have to turn to another fruit: apricots. These orange fruits are at their most rich in vitamins when they are dried, and they’re easy to snack on when you need that ‘something’ to munch on.
Finally, the buck doesn’t stop with fruits and vegetables, but red and orange spices also make up this merry band of vitamin A buddies. Some of the world’s riches sources of vitamin A can be found in spices such as paprika, red chillies and cayenne pepper, and even adding a low concentration of them to your stir fries and salads is enough to give you a huge benefit.