Seven a day

Last Tuesday one of the highlights of the news was a feature on how much fruit and veg people should be eating - taking the recommended 5-a-day and adding another 2. Given the timing of the articles (as it was in many news sites) I initially thought it was an April Fool.

Why did I think it was an April Fool. Well, there was the timing, but this quote (taken from the BBC article):

Experts said other lifestyle factors, such as not smoking or drinking excessively, may have accounted for the drop in mortality, not just fruit and veg consumption, although the study authors said they had tried to account for this.

So, the 'recommendation' that we should be eating 7-a-day rather than 5 may not have totally taken lifestyle factors into account. That doesn't strike me as especially good scientific study. And, I suspect this news story may actually result in people eating less well than better.

The 'findings' of the study (again, I am being cynical because the seeming lack of rigour to the findings) also seem to point to frozen and tinned fruit and veg being less good for you than fresh. Yet, for years the message has been frozen, in particular, can be better because the nutrients have been locked in. Tinned, I can sort of see, depending on the type of tinned fruit and veg. If it's in syrup (v high in sugar) or brine (v high in salt) then the benefits of the fruit and veg may be negated by the increased levels of salt and sugar. But surely it's better to be eating them than not at all.

And that, I fear, may be a knock on affect of this 7-a-day study. Those who are struggling to give their families as good a diet as they can, on exceptionally limited budgets, may just give up and being buying cheap filler stuff, with little or no nutritional value.

Also, it seems almost every week we hear how people are struggling to feed themselves and their families. Foodbanks are on the increase and are struggling to keep up with demand. What do they rely on to provide food parcels? Tinned fruit and veg, as they can be stored without refrigeration. So, is this 7-a-day target aimed at the (comparatively) well-off terribly, terribly middle class person who can afford to buy fresh fruit and veg on a daily basis? I like to think I eat pretty well, but would struggle some days to get 7-a-day in. I know what it is like to live in a home where the food budget  was very tight - we managed to eat our 5-a-day, but only because we included frozen and tinned. If a target is not achievable, people will give up and that would be much, much worse for the nation's health than eating the 'wrong' types of fruit and veg according to the report.

At the other end of the scale are the worriers. Those who take every piece of healthy eating advice to heart and (at an extreme) panic if they are failing to achieve this. I know of someone who gets very twitchy if they haven't had their 5-a-day (or think they haven't) and this increases their stress levels, which probably counteracts some of the benefits of the 5 in the first place. Surely, if people like them are panicking about not hitting the 5-a-day target, what are they going to do if they take the 7-a-day to heart?

People have a choice - yes targets and guidance are helpful, but at current prices 7-a-day fresh fruit and veg is way out of many people's budgets. It strikes me that there are greater problems in terms of people's eating habits that just the amount of veg they eat on an daily basis.