Turning orange

Raw carrot abuse is nothing to laugh at.

By Mary Roach

Jan 28, 2000 | At first I thought it might be a joke: a research paper on "raw carrot abuse," by one Ludek Cerny, in the venerable British Journal of Addiction. Perhaps Volume 87 contained an April first issue, and the British Journal of Addiction was taking the piss, as they say over there. Or perhaps it was a joke played upon the British Journal of Addiction by someone pretending to be Ludek Cerny of the Apolinarska 4 Psychiatric Clinic in Czechoslovakia.

Because I did not want to stay up until midnight (9 a.m. Prague time) to shout "Ludek Cerny?!" to faraway Czech-speaking clinic employees, I asked around among my friends. Very soon, much sooner than I expected, I located a domestically based carrot addict.

The woman prefers to keep her identity secret, but if you ever run into her, she will have a hard time doing this, for her palms and soles have, as she puts it, "an orangey cast," and the rest of her has a subtler yellow-orange "QT" tinge. The reason for this, according to one journal article, is that the palms and soles have a thicker "horny layer," and carotene (which gives carrots their color) has an affinity for the horny layer. This was the first I'd heard of the horny layer, and I made a mental note to locate mine and take it out for a spin some Saturday night.

Carotene also has an affinity for fat, so carrot addicts sometimes have orange bellies, breasts and buttocks. As befits a carrot addict, the woman I spoke with -- let's call her Dotty -- has very little fat, and so she has been spared this peculiar if visually striking fate. (Comforting note: you need to eat at least four to eight pounds of carrots a day before any part or layer of your personage turns orange.)

Since 1976, Dotty has been consuming 10 or so pounds of carrots a day, which she buys in 50-pound bags from a horse stable in Burbank. This means that altogether she has consumed about 87,000 pounds of carrots. If you laid those carrots end to end, they would not come anywhere near to circling the globe, but you have to admit it's a lot of carrots.

Next Page: "I would rather be thin and yellow than fat and pink"

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