Do Anorexics Really Turn Orange?

Factual Questions
1

Is it true that one of the side effects of anorexia is that their skin can turn orange as a result of eating too many carrots?

Is this effect due to excess beta-carotene? Could the same thing happen in non-anorexics if they ate too many carrots??

Thanks.

2

Too many carrots makes your skin turn orange, regardless of anorexia. (BTW it seems contradictory to me that a person with anorexia eats too much of anything. . . .) Same thing can happen with other yellow vegetables, such as squash. I knew an adult that went on some carrot diet and started to turn orange. When my daughter was about 9 months old we thought she had jaundice and it turned out she was just eating too much mashed carrots–it was by far her favorite and we had been letting her eat all she wanted to the exclusion of other foods.

3

Susan Dey of LA Law and The Partridge Family indeed turned orange during her Partrige years, struggling with Anorexia. Her diet consisted mainly of carrots, saturating her system with carrotene.

Danny Bonaduce told her to “EAT SOMETHING!”

4
      • There was a website of a girl that heard about the turning orange thing and tried it by eating only carrots for 30 days or so. She had before and after photos, and she did kinda get an orange-sort-of color to her. I think someone here provided the link…
        ~
5
6

Thanks!

I still don’t understand why they like to eat carrots so much. Are carrots any lower in calories than other vegetables?

7

Yellow skin can also be caused by jaundice (high bilirubin level), which can be caused by hemolytic anemia which can be caused by metabolic acidosis which can be caused by body fat burning because someone isn’t eating any glucose.

8

I think it was Cecil who remarked that carotosis (too much beta-carotene) is an affliction that “you really have to put an effort into dying from.”

9

Correct so far.

But I disagree with that.

Indeed, you can get a mild metabolic acidosis from starvation or fasting, but not enough to cause hemolysis. In fact, I would like to see a reference to support the notion that acidosis ever causes significant hemolysis.

The reason that people with anorexia look orange is due to more than the fact that they may eat carrots. Even without eating huge amounts of carrots, anorectics may look orange-ish. This is because their metabolism has slowed (as compensation for the state of starvation) and that leads in turn to decreased metabolism of carotene. So, carotene accumulates.

BTW, carotene accumulation (carotenemia) does not lead to yellowing of the eyes, unlike jaundice which does. Carotene is fat soluble and hence doesn’t deposit in the hydrophilic (i.e. water soluble) tissues of the sclera (the whites of the eyes). Bilirubin, the yellow pigment you see in jaundice, is hydrophilic.

10

There’s also the (slang) term tanorexic used in the UK media to describe a minor celebrity who looks starved skinny and dye-tanned or plastered with make-up resutling in a tacky fake orange glow.