Vitamin A

apullum wrote: »

Noreenmarie1234 wrote: »

It is fine, don't worry about it. The only side effect is if you eat sweet potatoes daily you may develop a slight yellow/orange tint to your skin from excess beta carotene. It is not dangerous at all, enjoy.

Yup. To expand on the science: Vitamin A overdose is rare because it takes a LOT of vitamin A to cause any health problems. It's almost always associated with taking very high dose supplements, not from eating a lot of foods rich in vitamin A.

If your skin starts getting that orangey color, you may want to back off the beta carotene for a while. It won't hurt you, but you probably don't want to be orange

To expand on the science even more: Vitamin A is fat soluble, so extremely high intakes will be stored and can be dangerous. But you don't actually get vitamin A from plant foods, you get vitamin A provitamins that your body can convert into vitamin A. Assuming your body is functioning properly, it won't bother turning all of the provitamins into vitamin A if your intake is extremely high, so vitamin A toxicity is not something you really have to worry about getting from sweet potatoes or other plant sources. Possibly from animal sources, which contain actual vitamin A -- say, if you went on an all-liver diet. But the most likely cause would be taking extremely high doses from supplements, as @apullum says.