Are raw carrots good for you? That depends. For starters, they can be hard to digest due to their rich amounts of fiber, so those with digestive problems - especially GI motility issues - might do better avoiding them altogether and instead, drinking fresh carrot juice with its pulp removed.There's another reason raw carrots are potentially a hazardous food and it has to do with chewing. If you have porcelain veneers or crowns and bite into a big thick piece, it is possible you could crack a tooth. Even if your teeth are natural and strong, they still pose a choking hazard, especially for some elderly individuals who may have more difficulty with chewing and swallowing.Setting those bad things aside, yes - carrots in their raw form can be quite good for you. They are a low calorie food - 3.5 ounces (100 grams) contains just 41 calories. Try them as a nutritious snack when dieting. To give them some added taste, use a low calorie dipping sauce, dressing, or other marinade with them.Most impressive of all is their vitamin A content. That same 3.5 ounce serving provides you with a whopping 334% of your daily value! This is substantially higher than almost every other common fruit and vegetable. Unfortunately, when it comes to other vitamins and minerals, the amount they provide is nothing noteworthy (less than 10% of daily values).In the measurement of how much antioxidants are in raw carrots, this ORAC value of 697 is actually somewhat low, for a vegetable at least. So even though they provide a high amount of the antioxidant vitamin A, carrots do not provide much for other forms of antioxidants.
ORAC Source
USDA Database for the Oxygen Radical Absorbance Capacity (ORAC) of Selected Foods, Release 2 - Prepared by Nutrient Data Laboratory, Beltsville Human Nutrition Research Center (BHNRC), Agricultural Research Service (ARS), U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) - May 2010