Our Love-Hate Relationship with Vegetables
By Elizabeth Somer, M.A.,R.D.

Behind my back I'm holding a dark chocolate truffle in one hand and a handful of broccoli in the other. Which hand do you choose? My guess is you're hoping for the chocolate; the broccoli is the booby prize.

Why is that? "Duh mom, because the chocolate tastes better," says my daughter Lauren—17-years-old, already a chocolate lover and wise in the ways of the world.

While you wipe away the drool from the thought of that missed truffle, let's take a look at this love-hate relationship we have with broccoli, or all vegetables and even fruit for that matter.

Don't Skip a Beet
We all know fruits and vegetables are good for us. Thousands of studies spanning decades of research consistently show that people who eat diets rich in vegetables and fruit significantly lower their risks for most age-related diseases, from heart disease and diabetes to hypertension and cataracts. Researchers estimate that at least 35 percent of cancer deaths could be avoided by diet alone, with fruits and vegetables leading the pack in cancer prevention.

Other studies show that heaping the plate with produce helps sidestep stroke, reduce symptoms of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, build bones resistant to osteoporosis, and boost the immune system. Hefty servings of vegetables also are a must for lifelong weight control. Then there's the longevity factor. According to a study from the University of Naples in Italy, people who live more than a century also live the healthiest. Their secret? You guessed it, they eat the most fruits and vegetables.

We're talking about Mother Nature's perfect foods. Fruits and vegetables are the best dietary sources of antioxidants, such as vitamin C and beta carotene. They are major contributors of fiber, which lowers your risk for heart disease and breast cancer and helps satisfy you on few calories. Yet, even if you took supplements and ate bran cereal, you couldn't make up for a lack of produce, since fruits and vegetables contain thousands of phytochemicals—from sulforaphane in broccoli, lycopene in tomatoes, and flavonoids in grapes to lutein in spinach, indoles in cauliflower, and limonene in citrus—that boost defenses against most diseases.

Couch Potatoes
With the deck stacked so high in favor of eating greens, you'd think we'd be shoveling handfuls of carrots into our mouths, blending gallons of strawberries into smoothies, heaping our plates with lettuce, stopping at every roadside produce stand, waiting at dawn outside our local grocer's to get first crack at the fresh produce, fighting over the last bite of peas at the dinner table. We're not. In fact, it's just the opposite.

Every national nutrition survey dating back to the late 1960s repeatedly reports that Americans avoid produce like the plague. Back in 1991, the National Cancer Institute established it's "5-a-Day for Better Health" program to encourage Americans to eat more fruits and vegetables. Not that there is anything magical about five a day. It's just that we're eating so little fruits and vegetables that boosting intake to even a measly five servings seemed like a manageable first-step goal. Only one in every ten of us meet this goal. The rest of us average about four daily servings. More than half of us don't eat fruit at all and one in every five of us don't include even one vegetable on any given day.

Even when we nibble on vegetables, the choices we make are mostly nutritional duds. Our favorite is potatoes, especially if they are fried. We're eating four times more potatoes than all dark green leafies put together. In fact, we're eating more potatoes than green, yellow or orange vegetables, and tomatoes combined. (Not that potatoes are bad for you. It's just that sweet potatoes, kiwis, and spinach are so much better. And, we are more likely to eat fries than a baked potato, which ounce for ounce contains three-times more calories and 12-times more fat.) Remove potatoes from the equation (USDA includes French fries and potato chips in the vegetable group!), and we're down to roughly three daily servings of fruits and vegetables. Without fries, most teenagers are lucky to get about two servings.

After potatoes, our other favorites are iceberg lettuce and apple juice, which pack about as much nutritional punch as a balloon. The good choices—the colorful stuff chock-full of antioxidants, vitamins, minerals, phytochemicals, and fiber—barely ever make the plate. Dark green and orange vegetables, for example, make up less than 10 percent of our produce choices; in fact, the average American puts a green leaf on the plate less than once a week, eats about one salad every other day, and takes about three bites of carrots every day. Less than one person in every ten regularly chooses oranges or cruciferous vegetables. Even when we eat two vegetable servings a day, more likely than not, we're eating the same vegetable twice. In short, my son's guinea pig puts away more vegetables in a day than most people eat in a week.

Can't Live With 'em, Can't Live Without 'em
We know we should eat 'em, so why aren't we walking the walk? There's all kinds of excuses given for people's lack of enthusiasm over produce.

• Produce is pricey. Granted, that might play a part, but price can't be the determining factor A study from the University of California, Berkeley found that only 14 percent of women with money to burn included even one green leafy on any four days. And, according to the USDA, Americans are spending a smaller percentage of their dollars on food than ever before.
  
  
• Produce is scarce. Wait a minute... availability can't be the main issue, since produce variety has increased since the 1970s from 150 to more than 400 different selections.
  
  
• Uneducated men don't eat sprouts. Education helps, since people with some college education come closer to the five-a-day minimum than people with less education. Being a woman also is an advantage, since women are more concerned about health, see more benefits in eating produce, and so include about one more fruit or vegetable in their daily diets than do men. Yet even educated women fall short of optimal.
  
  
• No time. Hey, with so many quick-fix options available today, from bagged lettuce to precut vegetables, this excuse appears a bit lame.

One possible reason why we fail at broccoli is we don't realize how little we're eating. In studies from the University of Maastricht in The Netherlands, 88% of people who didn't include ample produce in their diets thought they were getting enough. Feeling the need to make a change is the number one motivator for cleaning up your diet, but people aren't likely to eat more broccoli if they think they're already doing just fine.

It's in Your Genes
My daughter is right, the big reason why most people choose the chocolate truffle over broccoli is plain ol' immediate gratification—chocolate tastes better. But, since fruits and vegetables are so good for us, why don't our bodies have a built-in system to ensure we get enough? In short, why don't we lust over cauliflower like we do Mrs. Fields cookies? The answers to those questions are in your genes.
For hundreds of thousands of years, our bodies evolved to meet the demands of a harsh environment. To counter vigorous living and low-calorie supplies, the human body evolved complex systems to defend against weight loss and to maximize weight gain. Vegetables, and to a lesser extent fruits, were abundant throughout our evolutionary history, so our bodies had no reason to evolve a system for craving or storing them, but did develop a satiety button to protect against excess intakes. This explains why:

1. fiber-rich foods like vegetables or beans fill us up long before they fill us out,
2. our tissues don't store vegetable-derived nutrients like vitamin C, and
3. why we take vegetables for granted, i.e., foods our ancestors ate automatically to survive.

Vegetables, with the exception of olives and avocados, contain no fat and little sugar, the two high-energy items our bodies evolved, complex, appetite systems ensure we get enough of. Our brains release a stew of appetite chemicals, from serotonin to the endorphins, to entice and even force us to eat sweet, creamy, and crispy foods like chocolate, ice cream, and chips. No comparable appetite controls are in place for produce. Today we live in a glut of sweet and greasy foods, so our bodies get more than enough calories and there's no reason to fall back on the old staples: leaves, roots, and berries. The bottom line: We need to use our highly-developed brains to make sure we do consciously what our ancestors did automatically.

How Much Do We Need?
Before you kick your determination to eat more produce into gear, you need to know how many fruits and vegetables to shoot for. The Dietary Guidelines suggest each of us consume daily up to five servings of vegetables and four servings of fruit; that's nine servings a day from a very conservative recommendation. But is nine optimal? Actually, we don't know what an optimal dose is, but we do know that the more phytochemical-rich fruits and vegetables you eat, the more you boost your body's defenses against disease. Scratch the five-a day; eight to ten servings a day is gaining popularity as a healthier goal.

At first glance, that might seem like a lot, when you consider that it's two to three times what most American's eat. But it's really not a monumental goal when you consider that a serving is only:

• one small piece (one small apple or carrot).
• a cup raw.
• half cup cooked.
• 6 ounces juice.

Whatcha Gonna Do?
The two biggest steps are deciding to actively include more produce in your daily diet and having a plan how you will do that. The following six rules can help you override your genes and meet your quota:

1. Bring it: Stuff your purse, briefcase, backpack, gym bag, or diaper bag with apples, oranges, bananas, baby carrots, and boxes of raisins so you aren't caught short with the only option being a candy bar.
2. Double it: Turn one serving into two by doubling the amount you serve. Turn a salad into two or more servings by adding additional vegetables or fruits to that pile of lettuce.
3. Hide it: Disguise vegetables by grating them into sauces, pureeing them in soups, chopping them into pita sandwiches, layering them (spinach) into lasagna, stirring them (corn, carrots, blueberries) into muffins, or adding more vegetables to canned vegetable-beef soup.
4. Cross dress it: Please your appetite chemicals by disguising fruit as dessert, i.e. dunk strawberries in chocolate syrup, sprinkle crystalline ginger over mandarin oranges, or mix kiwi into strawberry-kiwi yogurt.
5. Two-fer it: Include two fruits and/or vegetables at every meal and at last one at every snack.
6. Like it: With 100s of selections to choose from, there must be at least a dozen fruits and/or vegetables even the most ardent vegetable-hater is willing to eat. Also, try preparing the same vegetable different ways.

When you think about it, life doesn't get much better than chin-dribbling strawberries, chilled watermelon, crispy carrots, or garlic-sautéed asparagus. Bon appetite!

Elizabeth Somer, M.A.,R.D., is author of several books, including The Food & Mood Cookbook (Owl Books, 2004). Her next book, The 10 Habits That Mess Up a Woman's Diet (McGraw-Hill, 2006) will be released in January. She is Contributing Editor for Shape Magazine, Nutrition Advisor to Prevention, and Editor-in-Chief of Nutrition Alert, a newsletter that summarizes the current research from more than 6000 journals. Ms. Somer is a frequent contributor to NBC's Today and she appears monthly on AM Northwest, the Portland, Oregon morning show.

Visit Dr. Somer's web site at www.elizabethsomer.com