We all know that eating five pieces of fruit and vegetables a day is healthy right? The science says so! …or does it?
Let’s take a look at where this claim actually came from. Getting your five a day is so embedded as a healthy fact that even the NHS promote it. But where’s the scientific evidence for this? As it turns out, there isn’t any! Not one piece of research with an evidenced based conclusion had been carried out proving that eating five pieces of fruits or vegetables a day would make you healthier. It was actually a marketing campaign, just as when Mr Kellogg promoted breakfast as being the most important meal of the day. It’s just been repeated so often we now believe it to be truth.
The number of fruit and vegetables recommended varies from country to country so where did this “pick a random number” notion come from?
Well it was from a partnership between the National Cancer Institute and The Produce for Better Health Foundation in California, the “Sunshine State” whose sponsors included many food producers, producers of fungicides, insecticides, herbicides and commercial seed companies to name a few who would just so happen benefit from everyone consuming more fruit and vegetables.
The number 5 when launched was just a random number that was thought easy to remember as you can count the digits on your hand and it was promoted with no evidence whatsoever at the time, or since, that this would be beneficial for health in any way and yet we treat it with much certainty that it’s true.
What’s more, we feel even better about ourselves if we exceed this number and consume beyond the recommended 5, and then there are those who take it one step further and take much pride in throwing numerous pieces of fruit and veg into a blender and blitzing it all up, drinking it as if the more we have the healthier it must be, true fruit and vegetable warriors! It doesn’t even matter if we’re gagging on the green and slimy texture and not very pleasant flavour of our liquid spinach because it’s all for the greater cause, but how wrong we are.
More isn’t better and we should never drink our fruit or vegetables, it’s not what nature intended. If someone lined up 30 pieces of fruit and vegetables and told you to eat it in its whole form, you’d never be able to do it. The sugar content is ridiculously high and also multiple toxins are released as the blending releases far more of the plant’s defense mechanisms than chewing does alone.
Our ancestors would never have eaten fruit and vegetables in such volume and in the Northern Hemisphere very few countries would have had access to fruit and vegetables all year through. They would have been eaten seasonally, for short periods of time and not to the point where the sugar, toxins and anti nutrients would become problematic and overwhelm our body’s capabilities of processing them leading to numerous metabolic diseases including diabetes. Neither would their crops have been genetically modified or sprayed with chemicals.
For a list of healthier fruits and vegetables, lower in sugar and toxins please see the regenerative eating section on Foods to Eat.
