Featured Image Credit: Kennedy News & Media
Topics: Health, Food and Drink, Life, Real Life
Gregory Robinson
Topics: Health, Food and Drink, Life, Real Life
A woman who loves her veggies has said that eating too many carrots turned her skin bright orange ‘like an Oompa Loompa’.
Dena Rendall, who lives in Edinburgh, Scotland, was shocked when her pals started noticing an orange flush to her skin.
Many of them thought that her change in colour was due to dodgy fake tan or a makeup disaster, but that couldn’t be further from the truth.
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The 21-year-old customer experience worker never expected the change in her appearance would be due to her decade-long love of carrots.
She was eating as many as 10 carrots, three peppers and a sweet potato every day to improve her health.
We all try to eat five portions of fruit and veg a day, but this totally takes the cake.
Dena says her conscious effort to complete the five-a-day challenge led to her developing a clinical condition known as carotenemia - a yellow-orange skin pigmentation due to high carotene levels in the blood.
Carotene is a lipochrome that adds a yellow colour to the skin. It is found in pigmented fruits and vegetables like orange, squash, papaya, mango, carrots and cabbage.
Dena vowed to cut down on her carrot intake after a shocking photo showed the Scot looking eerily similar to Roald Dahl's orange-faced Oompa Loompa - despite not wearing any makeup or fake tan.
Dena said: "I'm a blonde pale girl with very fair skin but because I eat so many carrots I can have a tan all year round.
"When people ask me what tan I use and I tell them I just eat a lot of carrots, they think I'm joking."
Dena's love for carrots began at 12 when she began eating around one or two of the pointed vegetables per day - which slowly increased to a mammoth ten of the crunchy snacks.
She estimates she spends around £40 a week on veg alone - purchasing six kilograms of carrots from Asda every week.
Dena said: "When I started getting into dieting, I started eating carrots but a normal amount maybe one or two per day, then at some point I was eating ten carrots every single day."
She also remembered the time she realised she looked like one of Roald Dahl's famous characters.
Dena said: "I was on my way to my friend's 18th birthday party and getting ready with all my girlfriends and we were taking photos.
"No one said to me that I looked particularly orange when we were getting ready, it was just when we turned the flash on and everyone started laughing.
"I didn't know what was so funny and thought oh my god that cannot be real. I looked like an Oompa Loompa!"