Posted by kathryn in Vegetables and Nutrition

I was recently asked the question – if I eat plenty of fruit, do I also need to eat vegetables? This is a common question and gets asked from both directions (ie also, I eat vegetables, do I need fruit?). The short answer is YES, you need both fruit and vegetables, sorry if that’s not what you wanted to hear.

Why do fruit and vegies matter?

Fruit and vegetables are important because they supply a vast array of nutrients we just don’t get from other foodstuffs. Fruit and vegies provide us with:

• vitamins
• minerals
• antioxidants
• water
• fibre

Some grain-based foods (bread, pasta, rice, couscous, etc) also provide fibre and a number of vitamins / minerals. While meat, fish, dairy and eggs have important vitamins and minerals. However fruit and vegies are the primary source of some significant vitamins and also of antioxidants.

The tricky thing is that fruit and vegetables provide different vitamins and minerals from each other. Fruit is generally higher in vitamin C, whereas vegetables tend to be higher in potassium, magnesium, calcium. Fruit has more kilojoules, whereas most vegetables (apart from potatoes, pumpkin, corn, legumes, peas and sweet potato) have neglible kilojoule contents.

Antioxidants

However it’s with antioxidants that the differences are most striking, because fruit and vegetables contain different antioxidants.

• while lovely lycopene is in most red-coloured fruits, as I’ve blogged before tomatoes are the most important source
• lutein is in green leafy vegetables and corn
• berries and cherries are rich sources of anthocyanin flavonoids
• beta-carotenes are mostly found in orange, yellow and green leafy vegetables

Antioxidants are wonderful little substances that protect us from all sorts of nasty diseases, like cancer, cardiovascular disease, the complications of diabetes, macular degeneration, etc. So we want lots of these in our diets, we need them every day and we also need to be getting a variety of antioxidants.

So not only is eating fruit not enough, we also need vegies and to be eating a variety of fruit and vegies.

How much should you eat?

In Australia there is a public health campaign to encourage the eating of more fruit and vegies – Go For 2 & 5. The general guideline is that we need at least two servings of fruit and five servings of vegetables (a serving is 1 cup of salad or 1/2 cup of cooked vegies / legumes). The majority of people do not eat this much, and hence are missing out on all those vital, vital antioxidants.

For tips on how to increase your vegie (or fruit) intake then look here.

03 July, 2006