Why eating “5 -A -day” is one of the healthiest habits to incorporate
Here’s a great family health challenge for the summer: make a chart on the fridge and tally the 5 fruits and veggies eaten daily by each family member. After a week, the winner gets a prize!!
Researchers say a ‘5-a-day mix’ diet of fruits and vegetables can improve your health and help you live longer. They recommend people start by adding 1 or 2 fruits or vegetables a day to their diets.
They note that some vegetables and fruits are healthier than others. There’s no magic pill for a longer life, but incorporating 2 servings of fruit and 3 servings of vegetables daily comes pretty close.
Such “5 a Day” diets are strongly associated with longevity, according to research published, March 1, 2021, in the American Heart Association’s journal Circulation.
“This amount [of fruits and vegetables] likely offers the most benefit in terms of prevention of major chronic disease and is a relatively achievable intake for the general public,” said Dr. Dong D. Wang, the lead study author and an epidemiologist and nutritionist at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.
Researchers studied diet and mortality among more than 100,000 men and women in the United States over the course of about 3 decades, along with data from similar studies conducted worldwide. Information on more than 2 million study participants was included.
The authors concluded that a diet rich in fruits and vegetables helps reduce the risk for the chronic health conditions that are the leading causes of death, such as cardiovascular disease and cancer.For example, people who followed a 5-a-day diet had a 13 percent lower risk of death from all causes, a 12 percent lower risk of death from cardiovascular disease, a 10 percent lower risk of death from cancer, and a 35 percent lower risk of death from respiratory diseases — compared to those who ate fewer fruits and vegetables.
Go to the first page of this website and grab your free offer. Let me know how many fruits and veggies you eat a day? Try out the family fruit and veggie challenge and let me know how it goes. I want to know.