Top 20 Healthiest Foods #12 Carrots

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What’s not to like about carrots?
Carrots are cheap, readily available, eminently versatile, easy to store, filling, nutritious – and colourful. What’s more, you can enjoy them both raw and cooked. No wonder carrots are the UK’s favourite veg!

Beware, though, of cheap uniformly shaped and sized supermarket carrots which have often been frozen with a resultant loss of flavour and a tendency to rot quickly. These have often been treated with pesticides too so, if prices are reasonable, it makes sense to buy organic. Carrots fresh from the ground have unbeatable flavour. (Actually, they’re easy to grow – why not give it a go?)

Carrots are rich in carotenes, converted by the body into vitamin A, which aids growth and maintains healthy skin and tissues. Vitamin A is also necessary for vision, so it’s not just an old wives’ tale that carrots are good for your eyes!

Additionally, carotenes are now known to have many other health benefits, notably because they have antioxidant properties which can lower the risk of some forms of cancer (especially lung cancer) as well as the risk of heart disease and strokes. Raw carrots, when eaten daily, have been shown to lower blood cholesterol and eating small amounts of this trusty root vegetable can even kill off some food poisoning organisms.

What are my 10 ways to enjoy carrots? Find out here.

The complete list of the Top 20 healthiest foods can be found here

Top 20 healthiest foods #1Yoghurt

How do you use carrots in your diet? Please leave your suggestions in the Comments below.

Find out all you could ever want to know about carrots and more besides by visiting:
http://www.carrotmuseum.co.uk/history4.html