Your result, the DNA positions behind it, and what the research says.
6/10 confidence.
Vitamin A comes in two forms. Animal foods supply it ready-made as retinol; plants supply beta-carotene, which the body has to cut in half to make retinol. One enzyme, BCO1, does that cutting. Two common changes in it each lower its activity, and carrying both lowers it a great deal more than either alone. People with low converter activity get less vitamin A from the same carrot than people with high activity, which is why beta-carotene intake and vitamin A status can come apart.
Good to know: Plant beta-carotene must be converted; animal vitamin A does not. The two changes together reduce enzyme activity far more than either alone. Low converter activity is common in European ancestry, not unusual.
Fun fact: Eating an extreme amount of carrots can turn skin faintly orange, because unconverted beta-carotene collects in the outermost keratin layer of the skin, showing first on the palms and soles.
Discovery: The two reduced-activity BCO1 variants and their combined effect were characterized in 2009.
The 2 positions this trait reads
Gene: BCO1
rs12934922 Arg267Ser (R267S) - reduced-activity variant
rs7501331 Ala379Val (A379V) - reduced-activity variant
Location: Chr 16:81,280,891
dbSNP rs7501331
Calcium Levels: A change on chromosome 3 linked to the level of calcium circulating in blood.
Content updated September 2026.
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