What is Vitamin A

What is Vitamin A

Vitamin A is the first fat-soluble vitamin to be discovered and officially named. Its best known for its important role in helping your eyesight, but it makes many other significant contributions to your body's health.

It's found in two forms:

Retinol - Is found only in animal food sources and is a yellow fat-soluble substance. The name comes from the role they play in helping your eyesight. They are sometimes referred to as "preformed vitamin A."

Carotenes - These include alpha-carotenes, beta-carotenes, and gamma-carotenes. Carotenes make up the red, orange, and yellow pigments of fruits and vegetables. Carotenes are considered "provitamin A", which means your body must break them down and convert them to vitamin A. This allows the body to use what it wants and eliminate what it doesn't want.

Benefits of Vitamin A

As mentioned earlier the most popular role vitamin A plays is in helping your vision. Its molecule is absolutely needed by your retina to maintain proper vision.

Vitamin A is shown to help in other areas as well. This includes maintaining healthy skin (especially acne), cancer prevention (skin and lung), and growth in kids, healthy immune system, and cell growth.

Too little or too much vitamin A can cause blindness, infection, and damage the skin and the immune system. It's typically better to get your vitamin A sources in the form of beta-carotene because the body can convert it to vitamin A and eliminate what it doesn't want. By consuming vitamin A directly in retinol form the body will just store it, which could create some toxicity issues.

Vitamin A Foods

Vitamin A is found in red, orange and yellow fruits and vegetables, including carrots, apricots, mangos, tomatoes, and grapefruit. Animal based products, such as, cow's milk and egg yolks, are good sources of vitamin A. The recommended daily intake is between 3,000-10,000 IU in retinol form and 10,000-50,000 in beta-carotene form.