What about vitamin A?!
What about vitamin A?
Answers:
One Carrot = 270% DV of Vitamin A.
Preformed vitamin A is not needed by the body, it can be synthesized by ingestion of carotene (often called provitamin A). Excess consumption of pre-formed Vitamin A can be dangerous. Good Carotene sources include: Green leafy vegetables, yellow fruits and vegetables.
Oh its normally in the majority of vegetables such as spinach and carrots. Its easy to be vegan and get enough vitamin A because it normally comes from plants in the form of carotine which our body turns into vitamin A. IN places like Alaska where there are no vegetables, they eat raw meat because other animals produced it in vitamin A so that is the only way to get direct vitamin A, but that is only in desperate places with no vegetables, Im not promoting eating raw meat. Vegetables will give you plenty.
Vitamin A is principally found in animal products. Plants do contain beta-carotene, a substance that the body can convert into vitamin A. The impression given by some vegetarian sources is that beta-carotene is just as good as vitamin A. This is not true.
Firstly, the conversion from carotene to vitamin A can only take place in the presence of bile salts. This means that fat must be eaten with the carotenes to stimulate bile secretion. Additionally, infants and people with hypothyroidism, gall bladder problems or diabetes either cannot make the conversion or do so very poorly. Lastly, the body's conversion from carotene to vitamin A is not very efficient: it takes 46 units of carotene to make one unit of vitamin A. What this means is that the sweet potato (containing about 25,000 units of beta-carotene) you just ate will only convert into about 4,000 units of vitamin A (assuming you ate it with fat and do not have a thyroid or gall bladder problem).
Relying on plant sources for vitamin A, then, is not a very wise idea. This is why good-old-fashioned butter is a virtual must in any diet. Butter from pasture-fed cows is rich in vitamin A and will provide the intestines with the fatty material needed to convert vegetable carotenes into active vitamin A. Vitamin A is all-important in our diets, for it enables the body to use proteins and minerals.
Vitamin A is an essential human nutrient. It may be found in any of these forms:
retinol, the animal form of vitamin A, is a yellow fat-soluble, antioxidant vitamin with importance in vision and bone growth, it belongs to the family of chemical compounds known as retinoids.
other retinoids, a class of chemical compounds that are related chemically to vitamin A, are used in medicine.
carotenoids or other substances that enable the body to synthesize retinoids. Carotenoids are organic pigments that are naturally occurring in plants and some other photosynthetic organisms like algae, some types of fungus and some bacteria.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/vitamin_a...