Cycling UK Forum

First off, this is a minimum requirement and people really should be averaging about 8 a day.
Not relevant to the post but misunderstood/misrepresented by so many that it needs restating.

We all have a fairly good idea of what was meant, something like a normal apple or orange counts as one item but when you get to something like cauliflower it is a portion.

There have been some manufacturers' claims and even dieticians' claims that are setting pathetically low standards for what qualifies as a portion of fruit or veg.

I always thought that it was FRESH fruit or veg. This was set to include things like frozen which it is argued can compare to or exceed the quality of older "fresh" produce, many have extended it to include processed and tinned produce too.

The thing that has set me off, is I just shared a tin of Heinz Baked Beans with my daughter and Heinz claim on the side of the can that just one quarter of the tin qualifies as one of the five a day.
A quick bit of maths and reading the ingredients shows that is from 34g of tomato (haricot beans (50g) dont count do they?) Checking with the kitchen scales we got that with just four cherry tomatoes. We almost got that weight with three grapes and four grapes well exceeded it.

Compare that to what I would consider that it meant, an apple weighing around 175g or an orange weighing 200g. I found a small banana at 100g which I would just about allow as one of the eight a day after the basic five.

So are there people out there kidding themselves that four raisins in the cereal with a fruit yoghurt,
baked beans on toast with an orange juice for lunch and a small salad with their MacDonald's constitutes a healthy diet in accordance with the WHO guidelines?

Its just a slogan to try and get people to eat less fried fatty crap. It doesn't mean much.

Al

Means even less to me, I love fruit but sadly it doesn't love me quite as much...

A portion is 80g, less if the foodstuff is dried. Most other beans count, so I'd assume that haricot beans do too in the absence of anything specific.
http://www.food.gov.uk/sites/default/fi ... pguide.pdf

Amazing how the people in that document can take a rough "rule of thumb" guide and make it into a very complicated scientific exercise with a totally unnecessary degree of precision mixed up with more random fudge factors plucked out of the air.

I found other sites which refer to the original recommendation being 400g a day made up of five 80g portions. They do present it as a minimum but nowhere do I find any official recommendation that you should exceed it to back up my earlier claim that it should be 8 a day.

Pulse do count but they can only ever be one of the portions no mixing pulses to up your score.

So a tin of beans (rather than a quarter) counts as two portions! I guess Heinz were fudging the quarter tin as a portion as it was 80g of beans and tomato combined.

The more I read into it, the worse it gets, apparently nuts count as well.
With some of the accepted accounting methods out there for meeting this requirement, I probably am always in double figures and they still say it is beyond an enormous fraction of the UK population to meet the five even with all the pathetic standards required. I am somewhat amazed.

Plenty of comment that any further gains from exceeding five are insignificant, I wonder if that is five which I would accept or five scraping the barrel of what you can do with careful accounting.

The "people in that document" are the Food Standards Agency, taking their advice from COMA (now the SACN) and the WHO, not a bunch of idiots. If you know better what are you asking questions on here for? Baked beans are a foolish way to try and get your five a day, they're full of sugar and salt.

If you know better what are you asking questions on here for? Baked beans are a foolish way to try and get your five a day, they're full of sugar and salt.

Well you sort of answered your own question there. The document goes into a lot of scientific detail to quantify exactly to the baked bean how you can make up two of your five a day with them.

Where as for any individual the number of baked beans that they "need" would be far more varied than the level of precision and complexity which they produce. It is about regulation rather than healthy eating.

A tin of baked beans contains 20g of sugars and 2.6g of salt, which would be excessive if the rest of the day's food was of a similar composition but in our case it very much isnt. I dont often have baked beans but they are not a bad food and I still will not count them in my five a day, whatever the regulations say about it.

It can be strange how different processing can affect the health impact of foods. I believe (though I am no expert) that whilst tomatoes are good for you (especially for men), tinned tomatoes are even better as for some reason they end-up containing more lycopene (or at least you body can absorb more).

Ian

'Five a day' should be upgraded. Its memorable, but its only part of the picture. A better slogan would incorporate an exhortation to do a bit of daily exercise.

How about Five a day, and walk, run, or play !

Al

I have the view that if the human race survived the ice age, the stone age, the iron age and all the other oldish ages without the nanny state of dietitions and their recommended daily vitamin allowances then it can survive this age.
Maybe the Internet has increased awareness of the worlds problems, but I don't recall obesity or diabetes reaching epidemic levels in the past like they are now, and that's despite people in general eating healthier.
I think I'll stick to cereal in the morning, bacon sammiches at lunch and fish'n'chips for dinner and be all the happier for it

Vantage wrote:I have the view that if the human race survived the ice age, the stone age, the iron age and all the other oldish ages without the nanny state of dietitions and their recommended daily vitamin allowances then it can survive this age.

I used to think that but have subsequently changed my opinions. It is true that historically we did not have dieticians measuring and lecturing us on diet. However, historically our diet, activity and longevity were very different. I think those ice age people behaved very differently from current western populations. And, I suspect they did not expect to live as long as we do. I have read somewhere (no reference - sorry) that modern high intensity agricultural methods can result is our food being of lower nutritional value. I can't remember the factor, but I was told that when I was a child an orange has significantly more nutrients and vitamins than a modern supermarket orange.

Vantage wrote:Maybe the Internet has increased awareness of the worlds problems, but I don't recall obesity or diabetes reaching epidemic levels in the past like they are now, and that's despite people in general eating healthier.

I agree about obesity and diabetes being a recent problem, and the important question is why ? I can only think it relates to our lifestyle (activity levels) and/or diet (more processed foods and lower quality foods as manufacturers seek ever higher profits). So I do wonder if, as a (western) population we are actually eating healthier.

Ian

I think I'll stick to cereal in the morning, bacon sammiches at lunch and fish'n'chips for dinner and be all the happier for it

You eat as you choose, it isnt a nanny state when you are given good advice on what to eat, that is just education. It is only a nanny state if you are given no choice in what you eat.

However if later in life you develop any of the ailments that tend to coincide with a lack of fruit and veg, you can not really come up with "It isnt my fault, nobody told me". Not that you would, of course, you have made your choice and are happy with it.

However if you had been adding a few grapes, a glass of sunny delight and a tin of baked beans in the belief that this would do the trick then you may have just cause for complaint.

Also eating a diet with adequate fruit and veg, is NOT going to prevent weight gain if you are still eating too much overall and it appears most of us (myself included) are doing exactly that. This is about another aspect of healthy eating separate from obesity, though often bad diets are bad diets in both ways.

beardy wrote:You eat as you choose, it isnt a nanny state when you are given good advice on what to eat, that is just education. It is only a nanny state if you are given no choice in what you eat.

+1

I eat what I want and when I want it.
I do exercise when I want and when I want it.
I'm not overweight IMHO, but I'm happy in my skin and I'm happy about eating and drinking.

I'm a darned sight more healthy and fit than most of my friends and relations, and some of them are less than half my age.

Five a day?
More like five a week for me.

Mick F wrote:Five a day?
More like five a week for me.

I suspect how important 5 a day is for any individual would depend on that individual. Like some people smoke 40 a day all their lives and end-up in their 90s suffering from some non-smoking related problem; whereas others smoke 10 a day for a few years and suffer smoking related illnesses.

Personally I'm probably on 10+ a day. Not for reasons of health or diet or because anybody says it's good, I just love fruit and veg (normally raw veg) so it's virtually all I eat. And when you don't eat much (what I think of as) high energy density food (i.e. food with high calorific value per weight), then you have to eat a lot of fruit and veg just to get enough calories in, particularly when cycling as well.

Ian

It's miles more complex than people think - especially doctors who can be a bit intellectually lazy. My father grandfather and I cover 134 years (ie back to 1882). All three of us type 2 diabetic in later life, but I'm the only one who has been overweight. I eat a better diet than they did. They both had physical jobs but I'm the only one who exercised as a 'project' if you see what I mean. The end result is a disease which is meant to be environmental/behavioural. Really? I don't think our environments or behaviour could be more dissimilar. But we share a great deal of genetics.