A healthy diet should include 10 portions of fruit and vegetables a day, doubling the five-a-day official advice, health experts have said.
Hmm.
Is there some confounding factor here? Like I don’t eat 10 portions a day of anything at all, in aggregate. So is it only people who are doing enough exercise to eat that much without getting fat that are living longer?
What day is it today??? 🙂
Wot Pogo said. However with the morons in charge of Public Health these days it’s hard to tell.
To which “fuck off, fuck right off, fuck right off and die, now, you cunts” would seem to be only proportionate response; short of filling a transit van with dynamite and driving it into parliament.
UK 2014 – where it’s always April Fool’s Day, but no-one laughs.
(I actually don’t think it’s an April Fool’s thing as the BBC carried it this morning and it’s in all of the papers – they usually do up their own. I *assume* the Telegraph’s is the Salmond £1 coin. Used to be they were obvious – now life is so fucking mad that it’s increasingly hard to tell.)
Considering 5 a day was just an advertising it should be an April Fool, but I wonder, for the same reason as Interested.
But what would cheer me up immensely, is for some naughty person at UCL to have carried out their own private April Fool and for all the meedja to have gullibly swallowed it…
“Used to be they were obvious – now life is so fucking mad that it’s increasingly hard to tell.”
Amen!
The sheer stupidity of “10 a day” is such that it can only be a joke…can’t it?.
They should have said “40 a day portions” but the smoking reference would upset the morons.
From Wikipedia:
Poe’s law, named after its author Nathan Poe, is an Internet adage reflecting the idea that without a clear indication of the author’s intent, it is difficult or impossible to tell the difference between an expression of sincere extremism and a parody of extremism.[1]
Aikin, Scott F. (January 23, 2009). “Poe’s Law, Group Polarization, and the Epistemology of Online Religious Discourse”. Social Science Research Network. SSRN 1332169.
Easy to get 10 a day, Tim:
Breakfast: Banana, apple and orange. Caffeine free coffee, skimmed milk and no sugar.
Lunch: Lettuce, tomato and celery sandwich. Wholemeal bread, cut very this and no butter or spread. Black herbal tea.
Dinner: Nut roast, sprouts, carrots and peas with one small potato. Herbal tea. Small low fat yogurt.
On odd numbered days you can also have a small glass of wine but only if there aren’t any children in the room otherwise you’ll be accused of abusing them.
But that’s four or possibly five “portions”. Six if you count the nut roast (which they don’t).
They are quite militant about the sizing of these portions (so your breakfast fruit will count as two between the three, for example.)
Oh, and vedge is better than fruit because has sugar in (code for: is nice) and frozen or tinned won’t do because must be fresh (ie only cabbage and turnips allowed from November to April); and of course only locally grown.
These guys are seriously insane.
Bloke with a Boat: I suppose eating all that shit would save the energy used to process decent food into shit.
Used to be they were obvious – now life is so fucking mad that it’s increasingly hard to tell
^^this.
I spent half the morning wondering what the April Fools actually were.
This is hardly news – it’s well known that 5 pieces of fruit/veg a day isn’t “optimum”, it’s just a more reasonable public health target. If people are eating 2 pieces/day and you tell them to eat five, they might at least increase to 4 or 5. If you tell them to eat 10, that seems unobtainable so you won’t change behaviour at all.
Am I misunderstanding the anger in the comments? The following seems like a statement of the bloody obvious:
“The clear message here is that the more fruit and vegetables you eat, the less likely you are to die at any age. My advice would be however much you are eating now, eat more.”
Now, if you want to take the view that you’d rather eat what you like and enjoy (say) 65 years on earth than have a miserable 95 years, then that’s personal choice. But what’s the issue with stating facts?
The evidence for ten-a-day is probably exactly twice as good as the evidence for five-a-day.
But for Christ’s Sake, 5 a day was just some US ad slogan.
No scientific basis whatever, apart from their Mums telling them to “eat yer greens” FFS!
California farmers feeling the pinch, are they?
Simon: But what’s the issue with stating facts?
Facts? What facts? Where?
I don’t have the money to get 5 a day, is government going to provide the money for increase in fruit & veg?
http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-London/2014/04/01/Vegans-and-Vegetarians-a-picture-of-ill-health
Can anyone flush out the consensus… (there is always a consensus)
One of the dingbats behind this farrago of shite had this to say: “We’re not meant to be eating junk food.” Therein lies the logical fallacy. It’s called the appeal to nature. It’s a form of question-begging. Meant by whom? What is ‘junk’ food? This is attempting to introduce normative terms on the sly. Nutritionists adhere to a discipline that has roughly the scientific content of palmistry, anyway, so they can cheerfully be told to get bent with no ill effect.
“Like I don’t eat 10 portions a day of anything at all, in aggregate. So is it only people who are doing enough exercise to eat that much without getting fat that are living longer?”
When I *was* training hard (a very long time ago) I did eat more than ten portions of food a day, but a lot of them had to be or at least include protein so I could eat 5 portions of fruit and veg but not possibly ten (even if I counted the unsweetened ripe grapefruit as two).
One might think that marathon runners do enough exercise to eat that much without getting fat but they do not live solely on a diet of fruit and veg because they cannot enough protein from it (nor can they digest enough calories from it in the time between the last meal and a race); a merely long time ago when I ran occasional marathons the experts and experienced runners strongly advised pasta.
Even the vegetarians I know don’t each ten portions of fruit and veg a day.