Reviews

Eating fruit and vegetables

The association between fruit and vegetable consumption and health continues to fuel great interest among researchers and health professionals. The evidence that fruit and vegetables can protect against heart disease, cancer, and other illnesses is convincing. Current recommendations are that we should eat at least five portions of fruit and vegetables each day, but what is less clear is how to put this into practice. A paper in this week's BMJ (p 855) finds that behavioural counselling may be one option, but are there easier ways to eat our way to good health? The internet is ripe with ideas.

One option is the "5 A Day the Color Way" (www.5aday.com), which categorises fruit and vegetables by hue: blue/purple, green, white, yellow/orange, and red. It is based on the observation that the phytochemicals and antioxidants in fruit and vegetables that provide a protective effect also give them their colour. Complete the colour spectrum every day and not only will you transform your plate into "a box of crayolas" but also you will receive the perfect cocktail of phytochemicals, vitamins, minerals, and fibre. And if this isn't motivating enough, the site also provides "5 A Day" recipes (including an interesting method of microwaving an artichoke), ways of encouraging your family (specifically your husband) to eat more healthily, and handy charts that track how well you're doing.

Still on the five a day theme, the UK Food Standards Agency site (www.foodstandards.gov.uk) has a particularly good fruit and veg section, which highlights the importance of varietythat simply eating five times your usual daily portion of broccoli doesn't count. The frequently asked questions section encouragingly points out that eating healthily can be surprisingly easy because things like fruit juice, olives, fruit jelly, baked beans, and raisins all count towards the daily quota (although unfortunately potatoes don't).

Perhaps the biggest challenge will be how to encourage children, who traditionally detest anything green and fibrous, to eat more fruit and veg. One way is to visit Enchanted Learning (www.enchantedlearning.com/themes/fruit.shtml), where children can learn nursery rhymes about "Peter Peter pumpkin-eater," make a magic banana, and even learn their apples from their pears in six different languages.

Giselle Jones. 

BMJ gjones{at}bmj.com