to think fruit and vegetables are a bit of a con

[mariej2]

Me and the hubby have both never been a big fan of fruit and veg. We don't worry about having 5 a day and probably rarely do. We are both healthy late 30s, not overweight and hardly ever get ill.

Now dd is at school we are having her friends round for dinner. One was horrified that we fed her daughter fish fingers, baked beans with diet cola. To be fair we would usually have sweet corn with this meal simply because we like it but we had ran out.

It feels like kids are being punished by feeding them kale and broccoli and nothing nice.

Apparently a glass of orange juice has as much sugar as a Mars bar. If you give your child the orange juice that's not much of a treat and once they become a teenager they will gorge on all the forbidden foods!

I think this whole eat fruit and veg is a conspiracy to make the supermarkets more money and make people miserable.

Each to their own

Each to their own likes

Oops, terrible phone typing.

Meant to say...the evidence showing that people who eat a plant based diet live longer than those who don't is overwhelming. Fine if you don't want that for yourselves, but don't inflict it on your kids.

Don't pass on your crap eating habits and your infantile attitude to fruit and veg to your children.

The idea that children 'deprived' of the 'forbidden foods' will go on to gorge on them is nonsense and perpetuated by lazy parenting choices to justify feeding children rubbish from the start.

Our children were never given sweets for example, and now they're 12 & 16, they still have no interest in them.

jewels where is this evidence?

It doesn't have to be one or the other though. Mine have sweets and crisps. They also have fruit and veg. Everything in moderation.

Not eating fruit and veg is punishment to your bowels, surely?

Well I don't know if I buy into the conspiracy theory bit, and I think it's a shame to miss out on the huge variety of delicious fruit and veg out there - picky eaters are a bug bear of mine.

But other than that I don't think YABU. Obviously fish fingers and beans are fine, and our bodies HAVE evolved to cope just fine with 'non pure' artificial foods. I have never observed much of a correlation between people who eat 'healthy' foods and those who are slim and illness free. And god, I look back to my childhood and remember having fizzy drinks and coke at loads of friends houses...I am genuinely surprised by the sense of outrage about this upthread

I think it was pretty rude of the mother to act 'horrified' at what her dd ate on a one off meal - rude and ungrateful. However I would be really annoyed at someone giving my kiddos diet coke, or any fizzy drink tbh.

I cannot even start to answer the rest of your post as I reckon you already know the truth tbh.

YY we love kale, we make crispy kale as a tv snack, it's delicious. You'll be telling me next that you hate the crispy Chinese 'seaweed'

Fizzy drinks are fine, imo, if they contain sugar. Diet drinks are packed full of artificial sweeteners. There's quite a bit of evidence about suggesting that high amounts of aspartame can cause quite serious illnesses and it can be pretty hard to avoid, so adding extra aspartame to your diet via diet drinks isn't great, especially for growing children.

I'd be happy for my child to have a glass of full sugar coke, some fish fingers and beans but I'd be very disappointed if someone had fed them aspartame.

If fruit and veg are a 'con' then why not try growing your own? Then not only will you be getting lots of healthy vitamins and fibre, but you'll be getting one over on the supermarkets. Surely that alone will make it taste better?

Our bodies have not evolved to eat artificial foods, evolution doesn't work overnight. You just can't always see the physical damage done by a diet lacking in nutrients.

Well I guess it's hard to point to definite answers re: artificial foods and aspartame etc, there's research pointing to various different conclusions but no proof. They're not being taken off the shelves due to any of this research, and we're not seeing people develop illnesses definitively related to artificial elements of food. I am currently working on the basis that our bodies are able to filter out that stuff.

Weight is only a rough guide to body composition and health.
Also, it may take decades of bad diet before chronic illnesses appear. Early indications can be found in medical tests though.

Even with “healthy” BMI, many studies using MRI scans have found 12-45% of women and 14-60% of men (variation depends on age, lifestyle etc) had excessive levels of visceral fat, i.e. the more dangerous fat in / around organs.

RunnersWorld , Wiki , MRIguardian , MRI-JPhys , FatMaps

Such folk are MONW (Metabolically Obese Normal Weight) and normally eat too much sugary, fatty, highly processed food and too little veg.
Compared to those with healthy weight and good nutrition, they are thought to be at increased risk of: diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, cancer, dementia etc.

I think you do have some point OP regarding the 'punishment'.
I have a rebellious personality and i 'm sure if my mum or the governtment have told me that i 'must' eat my fruit and veg , i wouldn't eat them!
Thank God i was brought up in Spain and we didn't count our daily intake of fruits and veg. We just ate them because they were available, they were delicious and they were cheap.
I don't count 5 a day.

If there is a mis-information i think that is the 'a diet with FRESH veg is good' blah blah. Frozen veg is actually healthier than fresh in many cases and cheaper and more practical for a busy family. Lots people think that it has to be fresh.

We don't eat 5 a day often. It can get expensive and its not clear its essential, although some fruit and veg are.

Just wanted to point out a glass of orange juice has a lot less sugar than a mars bar.

Who cares whether it's a conspiracy or not, to not eat fruit and veg is to miss out on so much wonderful food! Especially at this time of year- cheap strawberries, fragrant nectarines, lovely ripe tomatoes, big fat aubergines (my absolute favourite!)*. So good! There is a whole world of flavour out there, it doesn't all have to be boiled to death greens. My DC loves olives, tomatoes and strawberries as much as she loves crisps because they're tasty!

If you're really veg phobic, try some veggie side dishes at your local Indian, Lebanese or Italian restaurant. They know how to dress up a vegetable.

*I'm vegetarian, can you tell?

Fruit and veg is not a con, the more variety in your diet the better. You firstly need to change your attitude to veg and accept that eating more will do you good. Once you have done that it is time to start adding fruit and veg. How about an easy start by adding some variety to your snacks? A glass of wine with some nuts is healthier than a glass of beer with crisps, would that be a hard change? Or some houmous or quacamole or peanut butter on some bread for a more 'everyday' quick snack. How about having some dried fruit sometimes instead of a bar of chocolate? The supermarkets have lots of choice now so you could buy single snack bars of a few different kinds to see which you like best (I love dried mango and pineapple in particular). Then start upping the veg you have in your meals, try and have some veg with every meal and again, try a variety of veg cooked in different ways (e.g. brussels overboiled are terrible, chopped up and fried with bacon and garlic are delicious) until you find some you like. Top tip: boiling is for most veg the least tasty way of cooking it so try roasted or fried veg first. Accept that it takes multiple tastes before you will like something so don't cook lots, have a taste of veg at every meal and slowly you will find things you like.

Finally, that diet coke. It has no nutritional value and it's bad for your teeth because of the acidity. Worse, it tastes sweet but has no sugar so actually makes you crave even more sugar. Start drinking water or milk with most meals. Wine Fruit juice can be a treat at the weekend.

snack packs not snack bars.

There's nothing wrong with fish fingers and beans although if it were me I'd have added tomatoes to the grill pan along with the fish fingers but diet coke is a big no.

I'm glad our kids are adults now as I couldn't be doing with this 5/7/10 a day crap.

Moderation is the key, these "guidelines" are to try & ensure that the parents who generally fed their kids total crap in the past at least make a token effort to put some healthy stuff in there.

The average family menu shouldn't need a government propaganda campaign to ensure it's healthy.

If your kid's diet has benefited significantly from the "X A Day" campaign then, TBH, you were probably part of the problem!!

And for the record, when our kids had mates over & when they went to their mates it was generally considered OK to bring out the "crap" food as a treat for all & sundry......

Fruit and veg are not a bit of a con. Kale is though, it's cattle fodder

I do like it occasionally, although I prefer a big pile of dark spring greens.

I only really like kale when it's been turned into crisps or seaweed and I don't think that really counts as healthy. I would like it if the kale-lovers could share details of their favourite ways to cook kale.