Why You Need Vitamin A Whilst On A Diet

Have you ever been annoyed by a clumsy customer who walks on your feet and claws at you à la Dracula as he gropes for his seat in your row at the movies? Count ten before you slap him down for rudeness; he may be a victim of avitaminosis A (fancy language for lack of Vitamin A).

Maybe you yourself hate to drive a car at night because approaching headlights dazzle you. Maybe you find it difficult to read or thread a needle in dim light. One of the earliest signs of Vitamin A deficiency is a characteristic form of night blindness that makes it difficult to see after dark.

The next time you go to a movie, give yourself a slow count  of  twenty  when  you  get  inside   the  darkened theater. If you are not then able to see well enough to find a seat under your own optical power, you may suspect that your liver is running short of Vitamin A.

A large cross-country trucking company adopted the custom of feeding its drivers raw carrots (containing Vitamin A in its plant form) at the beginning of their night hauls. What happened? The number of night accidents was significantly reduced.

A private chauffeur with an excellent safety record suddenly suffered a string of minor accidents for which he was palpably to blame. Strangely enough, all of these accidents occurred after nightfall. He had taken up a diet fad to reduce his weight and tests showed that his Vitamin A reserve had been seriously depleted.

Vitamin A can be likened to the developer which brings out the image on a photographic film. The retina of your eye is comparable to the film in a camera. It contains a substance called visual purple. When light rays strike this purple substance, it is bleached to yellow and the brain records the process as the phenomenon of vision.

Obviously, to keep on seeing, the yellow substance must be changed back to purple—just as you have to roll a fresh section of film into place for a new exposure in your camera. Vitamin A is the chemical that changes yellow to purple again so you can keep on seeing. If you don't have enough of the vitamin, the redeveloping process is greatly slowed and you find it difficult to see in dim light.

That Vitamin A may have an unexpected relationship to the affliction (mostly male) of color blindness is indicated by a very recent experiment by Dr. Robert D. Loken of the University of California. Eight color blind college students took intensified Vitamin A treatment for a period of two weeks, in the form of a daily capsule containing 25,000 units of the vitamin.

At the end of this period the students were tested and found to make only half as many errors in discriminating colors as they did before treatment—a 50% "cure" of color blindness. It is too early to promise that all cases of color blindness will yield to Vitamin A capsules, but the test does indicate that some degrees of inability to distinguish colors may be brought about by vitamin shortage.

The special cells that cover the body surfaces and line the body cavities—skin and mucous membrane—are kept in good condition by Vitamin A. Shortages cause these cells to become dry and hard, lacking in protective secretions, and it. is then much easier for germs to get a foothold. In this sense Vitamin A is important in preventing infections, particularly those that attack the nose, throat, lungs, ears, and sinuses. It does not, however, have any specific effect in preventing colds.

If you are overweight, you need more Vitamin A than average because the requirements are proportional to body weight. This is an important point for reducers because of all the vitamins, A is most likely to be lacking in slimming diets. It is a fat soluble substance and important animal fats such as butter and cream are necessarily restricted because of their high calorie counts.

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