Posted by kathryn in Vegetables and Fruit

I’ve been pulled up on my last two posts in Q & A Thursday:

• Are tomatoes part of your fruit or vegetable intake
• Is fruit really important to a healthy diet?

As Meg and Joanne have both commented there are other “vegetables” that are actually “fruits”. How do these fit into the whole fruit vs vegetables debate?. Hmm, I wasn’t counting on botany being used against me!

Okay, it’s true I’ve over-simplified the message – something we nutritionists often do. Sorry about that.

What are fruit and vegetables

The dividing line between fruit and vegetable is blurred. While a fruit has a specific botanical definition, vegetable is primarily a culinary and dietary term. Vegetables are basically plants we can eat and the group includes a whole lot of different plant parts:

• fruits (example tomatoes, eggplants and cucumbers)
• legumes (snowpeas and sugar snap peas)
• stems (asparagus)
• leaves (spinach and rocket)
• roots (carrots, beetroot and radish)
• flowers (broccoli)
• bulbs (garlic)

Colloquially we think of vegetables as the plants we use for savoury purposes. While we regard fruits as being sweeter and something usually eaten raw.

Do you need to eat fruit as well as vegetables?

• The most important dietary advice is to eat a variety of plant foods.
• It is possible to get enough vitamin C from vegetables. However it is easier for most people to include fruit in their diet as well, to ensure adequate vitamin C intake.
• The foods we generally regard as fruits do have different antioxidants than those we regard as vegetables. Eating a variety of antioxidants is another important dietary strategy. So it’s a good idea to include both fruits and vegetables in your diet.
• It’s unwise to rely on fruit alone, as it’s higher in kilojoules than most vegetables.
• It’s almost impossible to eat too many vegetables. When the dietary guidelines talk about five servings, this is the minimum you should eat.

Is that a better answer?

This post is part of Q & A Thursday – a weekly burst of blogging, where you get to dictate the subject matter. Q & A Thursday is all about simple, practical answers to food and diet dilemmas sent in by readers.

If you have a question you’d like answered, then either leave a comment or send me an email. For more information you can take a look at the Q & A Thursday archives.

18 October, 2007