How much is a portion of fruit and veg?

So I’d like you to think back to all the foods you ate over the past 24 hours. Think specifically back to the meals and snacks where you included fruits or vegetables. I often describe a portion of fruit and veg as the amount that you imagine would fit in your hand. For example, 1 apple, 2 plums, approximate half a cup of vegetables (including beans and lentils) and 1 full cup of salad vegetables.

How many portions of fruit and veg have you had over the past day? And was this a usual day of eating for you, or would you normally have had more or less fruits and veg?

How much fruit and veg are we currently eating?

Just over one third of people in Ireland say that they are eating at least 5 fruits and vegetables a day. And while this number is thankfully growing year-on-year, it remains a fact that two-thirds of us are not hitting that bare minimum target of 5-a-day.

Plenty of research has gone into what key patterns of eating seem to have the biggest benefit to our health. And time on time again, it is seen that people who have higher intakes of fruits and vegetables have better health outcomes.

So what are the optimal intakes for fruit and vegetables? How much fruit and veg should I be eating to get the most benefits?

Our current Irish food pyramid recommends that we take between 5 and 7 portions of fruit and vegetables a day. If we look at our recommendations by how many grams to eat, the recommended quantity of fruit and vegetable intake combined is approximately 400g a day. However emerging research suggests that aiming for 800g a day (approximately 10 portions) may have even greater benefits. 

Unfortunately with so few people even meeting the bare minimum recommendations of 5 portions a day, it is thought that advising people to continue aiming for at least 5 a day is more realistic than re-setting the bar to 10 portions a day.

Realistically, my advice will always be: Eat more fruit and veg. If you are in doubt whether you eat enough, then you probably should eat more.

A handy way to visualise how much veg to include would be to strive to cover half of your plate with veg or fruit for every meal. By doing so, you will naturally up your veg intake, and reduce your intake of carbs and protein to the recommended portions of about a cup of cooked rice/pasta or 2 slices of bread (for carbs) and approximately the size of your palm full of protein foods.

What are the benefits of increasing our fruits and vegetable intake to at least 7 portions a day?

There is a whole host of evidence out there linking higher fruits and vegetable intakes to reduced risk of being overweight, of constipation, heart disease, stroke and of developing cancers.

Weight and fruit and veg intake:

There is a definite link seen between eating higher amounts of fruits and vegetables and being a healthy weight. As with most research into diets, we cannot say for sure that by eating more fruit and veg, you will lose weight, but there are definitely some reasons why we can expect that eating more fruits and veg may help you to maintain a healthy weight. 

Firstly, fruits and vegetables have what we call “low energy density”. That means that for the weight of the food, there are relatively few calories. So when you eat these low energy dense foods, you will feel fuller more quickly while consuming a lower amount of calories. This in turn may help with weight loss. 

Also, fruits and veg are usually high in fibre. Fibre has a tendency to swell in the stomach by absorbing water. This in turn also helps you to feel fuller more quickly. 

Fruits and veg are also useful foods to replace higher kcal foods with. For example, by filling up your s’wich with some lettuce and tomato, you could reduce the portion of higher fat cheese or meats. Or by snacking on fruit, you can reduce your cravings for higher calorie treat foods. 

So fruits and vegetables may help us to maintain healthy weights by filling us up more readily for a lower amount of kcal, by giving us more fibre (thereby helping us to feel fuller for longer) and by replacing high kcal foods in our diet.

Our bowels and fruit and veg:

We are recommended to take an average of 25-30g of fibre a day for optimal gut health. Fruits and vegetables are high in fibre and increasing your intake of these will definitely help you to get closer to those target fibre requirements. 

What happens in our gut when we eat fibre is that the fibre will absorb fluids and start swelling, much like we see when we pour our milk on our weetabix. This fibre mixed with fluid will help to move our food through our gut, thereby helping us to prevent constipation. As we will discuss later, the role that fibre plays to keep our bowels moving has clear benefits on reducing our risk of developing colorectal cancer!

Fruit and veg intake and cardiovascular disease:

Next, there is consistent evidence to say that a diet rich in fruits and vegetables reduces our risk of developing and dying from cardiovascular disease, including coronary heart disease and stroke. One large study published in 2017 showed that for every 200g increase of fruit and veg, up to a total of 800g a day, there was an 8% reduction in your risk of getting coronary heart disease, a 16% reduction in your risk for stroke and an 8% reduction for all forms of cardiovascular disease. 

Fruits and veg play a key role in the DASH diet, a diet developed to help reduce your blood pressure. The DASH diet recommends that you eat 4-5 portions of fruit and 4-5 portions of vegetables each day, among other recommendations to for example include 6-8 portions of wholegrains and reduce your intake of meat. 

And lastly, diets higher in pulses such as beans and lentils (more than 130g per day) are linked to a reduction in the bad cholesterol levels, also known as LDL cholesterol, in our blood. And high LDL cholesterol is linked to a higher risk of heart disease and stroke. 

So again, the take-home message here is that a diet higher in fruit and veg than what most people would consume at the moment, and including regular beans and lentils, may be protective against developing heart disease and stroke!

Fruits, vegetables and cancer:

One of the key recommendations made by the World Cancer Research Fund is to make vegetables, fruits and pulses (so those beans and lentils for example) a major part of our diet. They report that there is strong evidence linking a diet high in fibre from fruits, veg and wholegrains to a reduced risk of developing colorectal cancer. 

They also found some evidence that suggests that diets high in fruits and non-starchy vegetables may be protective against several other cancers, including cancers of the mouth, oesophagus, stomach, lung and breast cancer, to name but a few. They recommend that people should especially avoid eating little to no fruits and veg, as those with low intakes are at the highest risk of developing several types of cancers. So again, increasing our fruit and vegetable intakes has many benefits, including a reduced risk of developing cancer!

Are any fruits or vegetables better than others?

Much like a famous sweet advertisement, I recommend that you “eat the rainbow” – but then of different colours of fruits and veg rather than sweets. Variety is key, as each veg and fruit bring along their own unique profile of vitamins, minerals, antioxidants and phytonutrients. 

Striving to eat more non-starchy veg is likely where the biggest benefit will be. Starchy veg include potatoes, corn, yam and casava – and these would often fall more into the carbohydrate shelf of the food pyramid rather than the vegetable shelf. And including more vegetables than fruit may be useful if we are trying to lose weight, as vegetables are often lower in calories than fruit.

However, as I have repeated several times so far: Just eat MORE of the fruits and veg, rather than worrying about which exact veg or fruit to eat more of.

Make sure that you subscribe to my Youtube channel! And  if you hit that little bell button on my channel page, you will get notified when my next video comes out. I hope to catch you on my facebook, instagram, twitter and pinterest pages, where I’ll keep the conversation going until my next post!