beta-carotene vs vitamin A

amblight

I made an excel sheet with a more systematic overview of my reports, and nearly fell down my chair when I saw my intake of vitsmin A: it was 3-4 times greater than daily value! Which is past upper limits, and rapidly nearing chronic toxicity levels! But, by looking at the days with the highest levels, I realized that it must be because I eat so many carrots, and their vitamin A levels are in the form of beta-carotene, which doesn't synthesize into vitamin A unless needed. So, no problem. But, I wish I could split vitamin A into 2 catagories, one for retinol and one for beta-caroten. Is there a way to do so? Or maybe I should just make an entry for carrots etc. Where I omit the vitamin A...what do you think?
A

jayjay12345654321

This is the strangest question I have ever read.

Vitamin A toxicity is so rare that researchers have rarely seen it outside of Antarctica where people eat large quantities of polar bear liver. Preformed vitamin A is only found in animal sources, and you have to eat a LOT of liver every day for it to be an issue. The plant components found in carrots that our bodies piece together when needed are harmless, so unless you're devouring blood organs by the fistful on a daily basis, I wouldn't even bother differentiating in your Excel spreadsheet between the source of it. I'm sure it's a non issue and nothing to worry about. If you must separate preformed from components, just make two columns and enter animal source A in one and plant source A in the other.

Hope that helps. I really didn't know where to go with this question.

HappyStack

Unless you're turning orange, you're doing OK on the carrots

4x RDI is about 3000ug, I think, and you have to be eating about 9000ug a day for a prolonged period of time (months) to it to be toxic.

Just make sure you're not consuming too much vitamin A at the expense of other vitamins.

amblight

I know I'm don't have hypervitaminosis A, don't worry The whole point was, that I was startled to see that according to the report, I was eating crazy amounts of vitamin A - amounts that if it had been retinol, would have been dangerous. But seeing as I think it is really just carotene (since I know I haven't been eating liver or any other retinol-rich foods), I would like it to not show up in my 'report' as excessive vitamin A. So that's why I was wondering, if it would be wise to submit a version of carrots to the app, that didn't show up in the vitamin A calculation.

So it wasn't a question of 'omg, am I gonna die', it was just a practical question on how to account for it.

(also, in 100g of pork liver, there is about 14000µg, so it doesn't have to be extremely excessive amount for it to get pretty high!)