We’re all familiar with the advice that we should be eating – and giving our children – five portions of fruit and vegetables a day. But what does one portion of your five a day look like?
We checked in with our nutrition expert Lorna Driver-Davies to find out exactly how to make sure we get enough of the green (and red and orange and purple) stuff.
The great news is that you can get all the nutrients you need to count as a portion in loads of forms of fruit and veg – not just fresh. Dried, tinned and frozen fruit and veg all count, so you don’t need to worry about getting to the shops every day.
Potatoes don’t count as one of your five a day as they’re considered a starchy food and so sit with carbs like pasta, rice and bread. (We double-checked with Lorna about whether or not crisps count, but alas, our worst fears were confirmed: they don’t.)
Pulses, on the other hand, do count – baked beans, lentils, kidney beans, chickpeas, butter beans and so on can all count towards your five a day – but Lorna told us that they can only count as one portion. So if you eat baked beans for lunch and have lentil soup at dinner time, that only counts as one of your five a day.
But how much do you need to eat for it to count as ‘a portion’?
A portion is 80g, but let’s face it, it’s fairly impractical to carry your kitchen scales around weighing every bit of apple you hand out in the park. So here’s a handy guide to help out (you can find a more exhaustive list on – 33 per cent of our daily diet should be fruit and vegetables, so you want to make sure about a third of your child’s dinner plate is filled with veg. Lorna suggests a good measure at dinner time can be a kitchen mug: fill one and a half mugs with a variety of vegetables and you can feel confident you’re giving your child plenty of goodness in that meal.
If you have any questions about five a day, you can tweet us @EatHappyProject for answers.
