How Nutritionally Significant are Small Servings of Fruits and Vegetables?

From the standpoint of micronutrient quantity alone, it seems like you'd have to eat a substantial amount of multiple different fruits and vegetables daily in order to hit a healthy threshold as a dedicated trainer.

While I love fruit and vegetables and already include them somewhat in my regular diet, they are relatively time consuming to prepare and quickly perishable as produce. Making them a significant portion of your diet can't be a bad move, but do you have to eat them in especially large quantities in order to yield a noticeable nutritional benefit?

For instance, you often hear of people who put a handful of berries in their oatmeal or cereal, or who garnish a savory dish with diced peppers or onions. Of course, that's likely more for the flavor than nutrition, but how much of an impact does that alone make?

Hearsay, random online reading, and common sense comprise my sparse knowledge of nutrition. It's always seemed like the health properties of fruits and vegetables aren't very statistically significant unless you're shoveling them into every meal as the leading portion. Again, we'd probably all be better off if that was the way meals were approached, but simply including them moderately is much more feasible (say, only eating an apple every morning and including a cup of some kind of green vegetable to your dinner or something like that). How much does that really do by itself?

Plug in your diet on [url]www.cronometer.com[/url] and you'll see how you're scoring on micronutrients and fiber.

As a general science based recommendation: Aim for at least 500 gram of vegetables and fruit combined.

Micronutrients are often confused with phytonutrients. Micronutrients are elemental (calcium, zinc, etc) and phytonutrients have names that most have never heard of.

Berries, cruciferous veggies, herbs and leafy greens are especially plentiful in phytonutrients which have a host of benefits, and do not require that huge quantities be consumed. Even 50-100 grams of berries is a decent amount.

As for micronutrients, there is still a fair amount in a 100 gram serving of vegetables, although most will not cover 100%+ RDA of any given micronutrient. However if you combine 2-3 servings of veggies with a few servings of fruit, plus a variety of protein and whole food based carb sources, you will probably be fine.

To make cooking veggies easier, a good starting point is to go for prewashed greens and frozen veggies. Throw them in the pan with some chicken broth after you take out your protein and cook them down for a few minutes. Done and done.

Most Western government health recommendations are for 300g fruit and 450g vegetables daily. Eat that and make sure there's some variety in there, and you'll be getting most of the micronutrients you need, and the phytonutrients, too.

The fruit I just have chopped up for morning tea with a serve of yoghurt. The vegetables, well if you don't like boiled vegetables (and who could blame you) there's always salads, and probably more usefully there's soups, curries and sauces.

Most people only have 3-6 meals they always prepare for themselves, if not less. Make some of the 3-6 sauces, curries or soups, and you'll have no trouble getting the vegies in.