Published: 24 July, 2003

You may look like what you eat

Will your skin change color if you eat enough of a colorful food? (For example, if you eat a lot of carrots, will your skin turn orange?)

The answer to this question depends on the colorful food that you eat. The example you mention, carrots, is one of the many cases where it is true; you will turn a bit orange. Carrots are orange because they have lots of a colored biochemical (a "pigment") called, cleverly enough, carotene. Pure carotene has a deep orange color. It dissolves in oil but not in water, and it is stored in body fat. Carotene also absorbs ultraviolet (UV) light from the sun that can damage body tissues such as skin. The skin of people who intentionally consume pure carotene does change color, but just a little. They don't look like walking carrots, but rather the overall change in the color of their skin is measured by a device that measures the amount of each color of the rainbow that the skin reflects.

Many of the red, orange, and yellow pigments in colorful foods act in similar ways to carotene. Another example is the red color in ketchup, called lycopene. Some deeply green foods, like spinach and broccoli, have several colors including carotene. People who consume colorful foods, which are rich in these compounds, tend to have skin that is slightly less sensitive to the sun, though no one should stay in the sun too long just because they ate a big bag of fries with ketchup.