True story : I was devastated to learn that eating carrots for enhancing night vision was a WWII British hoax to confuse the Germans.

I spent the better part of my teenage years eating raw carrots to be a better Ninja!

> Decades later rumors swirled that the British Royal Air Force pushed that message as a cover-up for the recently adopted radar technology they were secretly relying on for their nighttime skirmishes.

> whilst the [British] Air Ministry were happy to go along with the story [of carrot-improved vision], they never set out to use it to fool the Germans.

> The German intelligence service were well aware of our ground-based radar installation and would not be surprised by the existence of radar in aircraft. In fact, the RAF were able to confirm the existence of German airborne radar simply by fitting commercial radios into a bomber and flying over France listening to the various radio frequencies!

Link: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-c...

I wasn't however able to find if there is any reason for the british to push such a message if it wasn't to confuse the germans.

> I wasn't however able to find if there is any reason for the british to push such a message if it wasn't to confuse the germans.

Could it have had something to do with rationing? Perhaps they were trying to increase carrot consumption.

Yep, that's what I thought too, but had no way of confirming it.

It can also be that they wanted citizens to cultivate more of it in their home gardens for its nutritional values. But either way, I have no data to confirm it.

Hell, it could have been a stupid reason. Maybe someone actually thought carrots improved vision; maybe someone just thought it was hilarious to make people thinks that; maybe someone needed another poster to make to meet quota and ran out of ideas; maybe someone had a bet on whether they could get a carrot campaign approved.

Actually carrots are good for your vision, but not your night vision.

That's true! To be more specific, the British had just invented the ground interception radar to spot incoming aircraft, and didn't want the Germans to think they had developed a technological solution.

I don't know if they ever thought the myth would catch on as well as it did, but it's still widely believed today. (Perhaps because there's no downside, eating carrots is still good for you, it just doesn't improve your eyesight.)

Additionally, sugar was also heavily rationed, while carrots (which are quite high in sugars) IIRC weren't.

Carrot cake also had a surge in popularity at the time (if the great show "Supersizers eat..." is to believed).

Huh. Didn't know. Proof http://www.carrotmuseum.co.uk/ww2carrots.html

You and me both! I mean, I like carrots, so I was eating them as a snack (my preferred method was to get a full carrot, eat around the core, and then eat the sweet core by itself), but I remember thinking whenever I got one "I wonder how much this will end up helping my vision" some day.

They absolutely do. And they might release very good information along with a carefully planted piece of terrible advice. So you might see a tutorial about how to send drugs through the mail that is 99% good advice, and one piece of intentionally bad advice that police officers are currently watching extra carefully. You don't have to get very high up in government to see examples of people planting false information to lead people astray about how things really work.