Is 10+ a day impossible?

You may or may not have heard that a new study has come out, which recommends that to prevent a range of health problems, we should eat 10 fruits and vegetables a day. Considering that this is double New Zealand current campaign for 5+ a day, it seems a little bit shocking....

.... but then I got thinking. I tend to try and focus on getting a good range of fruit and vegetables into my day, so is eating 10 of them as impossible as it seemed. I decided to do a wee bit of an experiment, that is in no way scientific, but interesting all the same. Trying to eat the food that I normally would in a day, I thought I would see just how many servings of fruits and vegetables I actually do eat.

Some sort of fruit is a given for me at breakfast, I feel quite lost if I don't get some in to my meal. On my test day, my breakfast consisted of muesli, greek yoghurt and berries. There was a decent amount of berries, so I guessed that to be around 1 serving fruit.

Lunchtime was one of Dad's delicious homemade bread rolls. This was filled with lettuce, tomato, cucumber and carrot. I would say around 1.5 servings of vegetables. I also had a pear which is another serving of fruit.

Snack time was a couple of bliss balls and a date scone. The bliss balls were made with dried dates so would have been around 1 serving of fruit.

Dinner that night so happened to be Jamie Oliver's six vegetable ragu. This would have been around 3 servings of vegetables.

So all up that works out to be 3 servings of fruit and 4.5 servings of vegetables, making 7.5 servings in all.

Hmm so maybe I don't get in quite as much as I thought or hoped I did. I'm pretty good on the fruit front but I think that I could get a few more vegetables into my lunch and snacks. I am going to start trying to get this figure up to 10 servings, so look out for another post in a couple of weeks with an update of how this is going.