CooLInfoLab: Purple Carrots

Purple Carrots:

Purple Carrots

When someone says the word “carrot,”

don’t you just naturally picture the long

orange veggie with the green top? Carrots

and the color orange are practically

synonymous, but it wasn’t always this

way. Carrots used to be purple, and

sometimes even white. How did the change

happen? The orange carrot you know and

love came to be in the 1500’s.

But before that, in Asia and the eastern

Mediterranean areas, they used to be

purple! Nature created a new yellow

vegetable by hybridizing the original purple

kind with different wild varieties. This new

version was then brought to the west,

where the yellow mutants and other wild

forms crossed to eventually produce the

orange carrots we enjoy today.

Also purple carrots contained up to five

times more phenolics and falcarinol than

orange carrots and both compounds are

being investigated for their potential to

protect against cardiovascular disease,

inhibit the development of cancer cells in

the body and reverse the negative effects of

high-fat diets.