5-a-day, any person from the UK should know straight away what we are talking about, we have been told for many years that we should be eating at least 5 portions of fruit and vegetables everyday (a glass of orange is allowed as one of them but only one). Now researchers from University College London say 5 may be not enough and that it should be at least 7-a-day.
So what were the actually findings? They found an inverse association between consuming fruit and vegetables and mortality, or chance of death occurring during the study. The study was based on food intake data collected from between 2001-2008 and mortalities where recorded up to 2013.
The results suggest that eating more than seven portions a day decreases your chance of cancer and heart disease, and that eating vegetables had more of an effect than fruit. They also found that eating canned or frozen food seemed to actually increase the chance of death.
This last point has had the frozen food producers up in arms (see the story on the website The Grocer) who say it is unfair to group together canned fruit (which could be in syrup or sugar water) and vegetables that was picked and frozen quickly, such as peas from that big green guy that are “frozen within 2 hours”. I would have to say they have a point.
Any way you look at it, eating more fruit but more so vegetables seems to be the idea.
Click here to check out the paper for yourselves, it is open access.