You can eat enough carrots to have your skin turn orange. But you'd have to eat a lot

Q: Is it really possible to turn orange from eating too many carrots? Is this why former President Trump is orange?

A: Carrots are a pretty healthy food; they're a versatile vegetable to cook with and snack on. They're low in calories — about 25 per medium-sized carrot — and have very high levels of beta-carotene, which is turned into vitamin A in our small intestines. Put another way, we can get about 75% of the daily recommended vitamin A requirement by consuming a single carrot.

Carrots are also a good source of vitamin K, fiber, potassium, vitamin C, niacin, B6, calcium and iron; they supply anywhere from 2% to 10% of the daily recommended amount of these important nutrients.

This makes them good for your eyes (specifically, the vitamin A), as well as for your heart, immune system, digestive system, teeth/gums, as well as other health benefits.

Although it would seem like folklore — and I'm sure many people would guess this is an urbane myth — it's possible to eat enough carrots to develop an orange hue to your skin. The color change is typically most pronounced on the palms of your hands and the soles of your feet.

Carrots are a root vegetable, first farmed in Afghanistan in 900 A.D. They come in multiple varieties (Imperator, Nantes, Danvers, Chantenay, Kuroda, Oxheart, Parisian, others) and colors (including purple, yellow, red and white, in addition to the well-known orange carrots). The orange skin discoloration is not due to someone eating orange carrots. It is because of the high levels of beta-carotene in all carrots.

Normally, most of the beta-carotene we ingest is converted to vitamin A by specialized cells in the small intestines. Excessively high levels of vitamin A can cause medical problems with vision, bones and the immune system, and can even lead to certain body metabolism issues. But this typically does not happen with excessive ingestion of beta-carotene, because the intestine cells regulate the amount of beta-carotene they convert to vitamin A. If the intestine cells that convert beta-carotene to vitamin A are overwhelmed by someone ingesting too much beta-carotene, this excess beta-carotene will be absorbed into the blood, and if a high blood level of beta-carotene is sustained (called carotenemia), this can cause an orange hue to the skin.

However, to get too much beta-carotene you would need to eat a lot of carrots — or other foods with high levels of carotenoids, such as pumpkin, sweet potato, tomatoes, apricots, cantaloupe, mangoes, squash and yams — and to do so for at least four weeks. By "a lot of carrots," I mean four 4 to 10 per day (this is an estimate based on some expert opinion, and of course the amount would be expected to vary from patient to patient). If you stop the high consumption of carrots, the skin pigment will revert to normal.

To be clear, I have never been former President Trump's personal physician, and do not know any specifics of his diet. In public, he has shown a preference for many fast foods including McDonald's, KFC, pizza and others. According to some news reports, he's also known to favor steak and ketchup, but not so much for eating a lot of fruits and vegetables.

From this, and noting that his orange hue seems to be predominantly on his face and not the palms of his hands or other visible parts of his body, it seems very unlikely that he consumes enough carrots or other vegetables to cause and maintain his orange facial tint.

Jeff Hersh, Ph.D., M.D., can be reached atDrHersh@juno.com.

This article originally appeared on MetroWest Daily News: Dr. Hersh: You can eat enough carrots to make your skin turn orange