People baffled after learning the real reason carrots are orange

Carrots are a well-known staple of most healthy diets, and we all know what to look out for when want them in the supermarket: the color orange.

But now, vegetable fans have been left baffled after discovering exactly why carrots are this colour.

And what makes it so shocking is that it turns out carrots used to be a different colour entirely, and if I'm honest, it's the last thing in the world that you'd imagine them to be.

Believe it or not, there was a time when carrots used to be white, as revealed by The Economist. Yes, you read that right.

However, when you stop to think about it, the colour white makes a lot of sense as carrots are grown underground, just like other white vegetables including potatoes and turnips.

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But as with all things in this world, genetic quirks do happen, and it turns out that carrots were selectively bred to become the highly recognisable orange colour that we have today.

Amazingly, they have more genes than us humans - a whopping 32,000 - and scientists have speculated that colourful carrots were initially grown so that people knew they were food produce and not wild ones.

Other carrot colour varieties that have existed include purple and yellow carrots - and to be fair, these do sound pretty tasty.

These were reportedly around a lot until a good few hundred years ago, when farmers started breeding the vegetable into the dominant orange variety we know today.

This news was recently revealed on Facebook, and people were unsurprisingly shocked.

Reacting to the colour revelation, one Facebook user wrote: "I want carrots back to purple! Someone with lots of money, please make it happen!"

"What what whaaatttt..." added a second shocked viewer. "Knew those other colours existed but I didn't know this."

"At least potatoes still come in all these colours," joked a third while a fourth wrote: "Maybe the printer just ran out of blue."

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Other Facebook users, meanwhile, shared that while orange carrots are the most common variety these days, you can still get the others too.

"I have got the yellow ones in my vegetable garden," shared another Facebook user. "Special taste, great for soups!"

Another added: "In Turkey we use purple carrots to make turnip juice. It's salty and usually hot. Foreigners don't like its taste."

All of which begs the question, would you be willing to eat a white, yellow or purple carrot? Personally, I like the sound of purple carrots, although it's hard not to imagine them tasting like beetroot.