How much fruit should you eat for good health, and the reality?

How much fruit should we eat daily?

1. WHO Recommends getting a minimum of 400 grams of Fruits and Vegetables per day, divided across 5 portions.
2. The most effective split is 2 servings of fruits and 3 servings of vegetables per day.? A serving is 80 grams.
3. Therefore 160 grams of fruits and 240 grams of vegetables is the minimum that we should be eating to prevent chronic diseases.?
4. How much is too much? Eating less than 2 servings of fruits and vegetables a day was linked to poor health, eating 5 was optimal, and eating more than 5 did not give any additional benefits.?
5. While eating more fruits and veg was not harmful, eating more of the starchy, sugary kind like potatoes, peas, corn or fruit juices was linked to poor health outcomes.
6. Therefore, if you want to increase your fruit and vegetable intake, you can do so as long as your diet is diversified and does not include only the sweet, starchy stuff.

How much are Indians actually eating right now?

1. 98.4% of adult Indians do not eat the required 5 servings of fruit and vegetables a day.
2. Despite being a largely vegetarian nation, the mean serving of F&V being consumed in a day is 1.7 - much below the recommended amount of 5 servings.
3. A moderately active adult male should get around 126 calories a day from fruits. An urban Indian gets only around 45 calories from fruits.?
4. So, what do we eat a lot of instead, if not F&V? We eat a lot of salt - 8 to 9 grams a day against the recommendation of <5 grams.
5. We eat a lot of processed foods, as reflected by the mean fasting glucose of Urban India - 101.6 mg/dl. The normal range is 70 to 100. So, already we have a high incidence of prediabetes.
6. How do we get so much salt and sugar? Because we consume a lot of wheat, rice, papad, chips, namkeen, achar, chocolate, toffee etc. on a DAILY basis
7. The biggest culprits were chocolate/toffees & chips/namkeen. More than 50% of the country seems to eat them daily/at least once a week.?
8. We are also not eating enough protein, the richest urban Indian gets 230 calories from protein per day, and the poorest in rural India gets only 63.
9. As you can see, the problem of our country is not the sugar in fruits. The problem is we are filling ourselves up with cheap, refined carbohydrates that are high in salt and sugar.?
10. As a consequence, we are not getting enough protein or whole foods.

The moral of the story —> eat your fruits and vegetables, and reduce processed foods. Start with small changes - you don’t need to go from zero to a hundred immediately. You’re not a Ferrari. This means you don’t need to entirely cancel out processed foods, but you should try and make small feasible changes like walking 1000 extra steps this week or adding 1 extra portion of protein.

Data source: NNMS Survey 2017-18