5-A-Day Vegetables and Fruit Made Easy: The regular guy’s guide to produce

Answer this question with brutal honesty: Are you eating five servings of fruits and/or vegetables every day? If not, the excuses you likely use – time, convenience, taste, lack of cooking skills – can all be overcome quite easily. Just set aside one hour per month in a supermarket, then make a simple meal (recipe below) in less than 15 minutes and you’ll see how.

If you succeed, you’ll be doing better than half the population of industrialized countries. That other half is far more prone to disease, obesity and premature death.

In brief, here’s why you can do it:

• Frozen and canned fruits and vegetables retain as much and usually more nutrients than what we consider fresh from a supermarket.
• Produce cooks very quickly.
• You’re all grown up now: you are allowed to flavor things any way you want.

And just for reference, a serving is about the size of your fist. More technically speaking, for leafy vegetables it’s a measuring cup (slightly larger than an average coffee cup) and for whole fruit, chopped vegetables or beans, one serving is a half-cup.

I suggest you approach this in three steps:

Step 1: Go to the grocery store once a month

For nutrition purposes, it is not necessary to eat fresh vegetables. Frozen is just as or more nutritious than what we often consider "fresh," and so are dried and canned foods. So stock up every 4-6 weeks. If you have them in the house, you’re more likely to eat them.

How can that be? Research conducted at the University of Illinois/Champaign-Urbana under the direction of Dr. Barbara Klein (see links to read more), a professor of foods and nutrition, found that frozen green beans contain twice as much vitamin C as raw green beans. Why? What we consider to be “fresh” spends days and even weeks in transit from where it is grown. Vitamins and other nutrients (phytochemicals and other micronutrients with antioxidant properties) degenerate over this time in many varieties of vegetables and fruit. But fruits and vegetables found in the freezer case were frozen within a day of picking – and Dr. Klein’s research indicates that most of the nutrients thus remain locked in during both the freezing and canning processes and even as the food sits on a shelf, months and years later. Subsequent studies have confirmed similar results for other vegetables and fruit in both canned and frozen versions.

The exception to this of course is picked-today fresh, as what you might find in a farmer's market or from your own garden.

Think about how this can change your life. On the average workday you get home late and tired, perhaps after a workout at the gym after work. If you ordered a pizza or warmed up some frozen dinner, it might take 20-30 minutes minimum to get either. Both of those options are pretty dense in processed carbohydrates and fat. Both might have the presence of some vegetables (one serving, probably), but the calories offset the benefit.

Step 2: Visit a convenience store when you have to

Yeah, that’s right. That little overpriced 24-7 mini-mart can be a wellspring of good health if you know how to avoid about 98 percent of what they sell. Need to snack? Most now sell apples, bananas and oranges. Vegetable juices too.

This is neither brain surgery nor mountain climbing.

Step 3: Try the seven minute meal (or 15 minute soup)

Simply microwave a bag of frozen broccoli (or other vegetable) – most bags contain 3 to 5 servings – and after it’s cooked mix in canned beans, chicken or beef (canned meats have come a long way) or even chopped up lunch meat (e.g., sliced turkey or ham), with a little olive oil, lemon juice and parmesan cheese. All ingredients are optional, of course. Stir and eat.

Just when you start to think about dessert, start gnawing on an apple. If you want to get fancy, slice it (leave the peel on) and microwave it with some cinnamon, maybe even top it off with low-fat cottage cheese or yogurt. There you go – another serving of fruit.

Another option is the 15-minute vegetable and chicken soup. Make it on the weekend and you will have a quick vegetable meal for several days afterward. Depending on how much you eat, you might get as much as your full five servings of vegetables for the day.

Ingredients:

1. Chicken broth (canned) – 12 ounces
2. Water – 48 ounces (4 of the chicken broth cans)
3. Broccoli* – 16 ounce frozen bag or equivalent 4-5 portion servings
4. Diced tomatoes – 12 ounce can
5. Garbanzo beans** – 12 ounce can
6. Chicken – About 16 ounces pre-cooked and diced, or the canned version
7. Flavorings: Lemon juice, black pepper, oregano and others to taste (note the chicken broth and canned juices are high in sodium therefore you would do well to avoid adding additional salt)

*Substitute any frozen green vegetable, such as green beans, green peppers, spinach. Or, chopped fresh cabbage.

**Substitute canned black or red kidney beans, or lentils

Directions:

Combine all ingredients and cook at high heat for 15 minutes, stirring occasionally and reducing heat once it reaches a boil. THAT’S RIGHT, JUST TOSS EVERYTHING INTO A KETTLE AND HEAT IT UP. It’ll be done long before the pizza guy could possibly get there.

“But I hate broccoli”

OK, so the bratty kid in all of us has yet to leave the premises. It is time to grow up, and it’s not that hard.

For starters, when we say we hate certain foods, it might just be we hate the way our mothers served those foods.

Research done by Yale University’s Dr. Linda Bartoshuk, a leading scientist who researches genetic variants in the ability to taste, offers some serious food for thought on flavor preferences. There are supertasters, who tend to be female, for whom subtle tastes come through strongly. There are moderate tasters and nontasters – the latter skewing male, characterized by an inability to perceive taste unless it is present in great quantity (think very spicy foods, Tabasco sauce, etc.).

Which brings up a possible flaw in child rearing in the modern world. If your mother served vegetables that were bland to you, they may well have tasted perfectly fine to her. Now, turn it around. If you threw some strong flavors onto your vegetables – anything from a spice or herb shelf, such as hot pepper, oregano, or the more exotic turmeric, perhaps mixed with a little olive oil or even a pat or two of melted butter, and lemon juice – things might get a little more interesting. Experiment wildly to find what works for you.

And why are we doing this again?

Almost every lifestyle-related disease – adult-onset diabetes, heart disease, stroke, high blood pressure, high bad cholesterol, various cancers – occurs in lower incidence among populations and individuals who eat a lot of fruit and vegetables. Evidence is also building that suggests eating the whole food, instead of a supplement of just one nutrient (e.g., a tomato vs. lycopene pills) works with greater efficacy (follow link below to Wikipedia for additional information).

Weight management also is tied to consumption of fruits and vegetables, particularly in soups, according to research by Dr. Barbara Rolls at Pennsylvania State University. She studies energy density, which leads her to recommend diluting meals with highly fibrous foods (fruits, vegetables and whole grains) and water, as in soups. Fruits and vegetables also have high water content.

This is probably what happened to my friend Jesse last summer. She and her husband Tom signed up for a weekly organic vegetable delivery. Due to their travel schedules, it was more than they could handle (I got their leftovers). Even at that, without trying, she lost 12 pounds – likely due to a displacement of energy-dense foods by the water and fiber onslaught of those vegetables.

Bottom line: with fruits and vegetables, regularly consumed in quantity (which you can do because you always have some on hand in your freezer), you increase nutrient intake even as you reduce caloric consumption.

So you’re now officially out of excuses. Go make some soup.

# # #

Russ Klettke is an ACE (American Council on Exercise) certified fitness trainer and also the author of “A Guy’s Gotta Eat, the regular guy’s guide to eating smart” (Marlowe & Co., 2004, with Deanna Conte, MS RD LD), available at Amazon.com, BarnesandNoble.com and more than 70 public library systems in the U.S., Canada and Europe. See other articles by this writer on practical approaches to fitness and nutrition for busy people.