Choose a variety of fruits and vegetables daily: Understanding the complexities

The 2000 edition of Nutrition and Your Health: Dietary Guidelines for Ameri cans is the first to include a recommendation aimed specifically at fruits and vegetables, apart from grains. This paper discusses these changes in th e Dietary Guidelines, summarizes the methods of assessment pertaining to fr uit and vegetable intakes and their related factors, and reviews the data a vailable on current levels and trends over time. Recent methodological adva nces in the measurement of both the aggregate U.S. food supply and foods co nsumed by individuals have allowed for better estimates with which recommen dations can be compared. The data on individual intakes suggest the followi ng: Americans are consuming fruits and vegetables at a level near the minim um recommendations; to be in concordance with energy-based recommendations, they would have to consume similar to2 more servings per day; and dark gre en and deep yellow vegetables are accounting for a disproportionately small share of the total. Fruit and vegetable consumption appears to be rising, but only slightly, and this increase might be only an artifact of shifts in the population demographics. A number of studies suggest that tow income h ouseholds in poor central cities and sparsely populated rural areas often h ave less access to food stores and face higher prices for food, including f ruits and vegetables, compared with other households. At the aggregate leve l, supplying enough fruits and vegetables to meet dietary recommendations f or all U.S, consumers would require adjustments in U.S. agricultural produc tion, trade, marketing practices and prices of these commodities.