Hot on the heels of the study that found that eating at least 7 servings of fruit and vegetables per day was the best for lowering chance of death a meta analysis has found that actually 5 is enough.
So who is right? Well, that is a tricky question, the original study was of 65,226 people in England between the years 2001 and 2008. The new study is a meta analysis of 16 studies from around the world that have been pooled together.
What both studies show is that up to a point each additional fruit and vegetable serving you have seems to lower the chance of death, but in the original study they found the point at which eating more does not help more is 7 a day and the new one finds that after 5 a day there is no additional benefit.
Either way a minimum of 5 seems to be the way to go and if you can 7 is not going to do you harm.
The paper is open access and available from the British Medical Journal website.