Trivia # 12 : Carrots

• Vitamin A is known to prevent “night blindness,” and carrots are loaded with Vitamin A. One carrot provides more than 200% of recommended daily intake of Vitamin A. 
• Carrots have zero fat content. 
• Carrots are native to Afghanistan.
• Red, black yellow, white, purple - these were the colors that carrots started out with. Everything but orange. Carrots were first cultivated in Afghanistan in the 7th century, and they started with yellow flesh and a purple exterior. It was the Dutch who developed the orange carrot, and the French in the 17th who most likely developed the elongated carrot, ancestor of the ones we eat today. The English brought the carrot to the New World.
• There were originally red, purple and black varieties of carrots that contained anthocyanin pigments.  The yellow, and eventually orange varieties of carrots were developed in the 16th and 17th centuries, they contain no anthocyanin pigments, but rather carotenoids which are responsible for the yellow and orange color.