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	Podcast:		UC Science Today
	Episode:		Why you may want to make carrot cake in wintertime
	Category:		Science & Medicine
	Duration:		00:01:02
	Publish Date:		2016-01-15 00:00:00
	Description:		Planning to make some carrot cake this winter? It turns out carrots grow sweeter in the colder weather, so it may be great timing for your sweet tooth. Science educator and UCLA fellow, Liz Roth-Johnson, says because plants are immobile, they need to adapt to the cold and in the case of carrots, these protective measures make them sweeter. "So, they’ve developed all these amazing adaptations to deal with their environment, to deal with things that want to eat them, to deal with the cold. And so a vegetable like a carrot that’s growing in the ground in the cold weather, in order to defend itself against the cold, it’s developed all these amazing physiologic responses, including increasing the sugar content." This defends the carrot against ice crystal formation … "Which can do all kinds of terrible things to cells like dehydrate them, crush them and rupture them and so along with many other responses, this increase in sugar content helps defend the carrot against frost and cold. And the great benefit of that is when we harvest those carrots in colder weather, they taste much sweeter."
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