Inc.
Five-a-day may be healthy, but it may not be enough.
Even If You Eat Enough Veggies, You’re Probably Missing This Brain-Protecting Nutrient
Author: Jessica Stillman
Nutritional guidelines have gone back and forth over the years. Eat less fat. No wait, eat more. Eggs are bad. Actually, they’re OK. Wine will protect your heart. No, it will up your risk of cancer. But one thing has remained constant despite all this shifting advice. Fruits and vegetables are great for you and you should eat more of them.
We’ve been urged to eat “five a day” for decades, and many of us have heeded the call. Dutifully munching our five servings of salad and fruit, we assume that if we meet the government’s recommendations, we’ll get all the key nutrients we need from this food group .
Unfortunately, a new study out of Harvard Medical School and University of Reading in the UK found that’s not the case. The research found that a whopping 80 percent were short of an important group of nutrients found in fruits and veggies that’s been linked to better heart health and slower brain aging.
80 percent of us don’t get enough of this key nutrient
People are often unreliable reporters of their own diets, so the scientists behind this new study, recently published in Food & Function, took a different approach to measuring whether we’re getting all the nutrients we need from fruits and veggies. They analyzed people’s urine.
Results from the analyses of 30,000 individuals in the UK and US, revealed a harsh truth. Despite so many years of hectoring from public health officials, a whopping 80 percent of us still aren’t getting enough of a key group of nutrients from fruits and vegetables — flavanols.
The recommended daily intake of flavanols is 500mg. And while “it’s perfectly possible to get 500mg of flavanols per day from a normal diet,” study co-author Gunter Kuhnle recently explained on The Conversation. “Fewer than one in five participants actually did this – even among those who ate their five a day.”
That means that even “people who follow current dietary recommendations are unlikely to consume a sufficient amount of flavanols,” he concludes.
Why you should care about flavanols
Before we get to what this means for your own diet, it’s worth detouring for a moment to discuss why you should care. What are ‘flavanols’ and why does it matter how much you get of them?
Flavanols are a group of compounds that give plants their bright colors. Foods like blueberries and plums contain lots of them. So does tea and dark chocolate. Fruits and vegetables with less vibrant colors, like cauliflower and pears, contain much less.
These chemicals are good for decorating your dinner plate attractively. But they’ve also been linked to a wide range of health benefits. “Consuming large amounts of flavonoid-rich foods can help protect against various health conditions, including diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and certain types of cancer,” reports Harvard Health.
Recent research also links them with slower cognitive decline as people age. One recent (tasty-sounding) experiment gave participants a cocoa-based beverage rich in flavanols and observed blood flow to their brain. The results showed those given flavanols not only got more blood, and therefore more oxygen, to their brains but also performed slightly better on cognitive tests.
How to adjust your diet
Staying sharp as you age and avoiding a host of dread health conditions is pretty good motivation to try and get enough flavanols in your diet. And this latest study makes it pretty clear that just hitting the good, old “five a day” guidance isn’t enough to do that.
“A random selection of five fruits and veg each day is unlikely to provide meaningful amounts,” warns Kuhnle.
So how should you shift what you eat? Unsurprisingly, the study authors advise consciously adding more flavanol-rich foods to your diet. Kuhnle’s article contains a chart listing the flavanol content of a wide variety of plant foods, but these pack the most flavanols in the fewest servings:
- Plums
- Cranberries
- Blackberries
- Green tea
- Cherries
- Apples (skin on)
You don’t have to go wild, scarfing dark colored plants all day long either. “A handful of blackberries, a whole apple or having a cup of green tea alongside your meal makes a real difference,” Javier Ottaviani, the study’s lead author, told the BBC.
The old food pyramid, the new updated one, and probably your mom all tell you to eat enough fruits and veggies. That’s good advice, of course. But what none of them probably told you is that all fruits and veg are not created equal.
Some pack an extra nutritional punch because of the flavanols they contain. If you don’t pay attention to including these in your diet, you’re still probably not getting enough of this key nutrient.
Credits: TCA, LLC.