Here’s a wonderfully boring chart, showing the change in the proportion of adults in England who meet the government’s recommendations for eating at least five portions of fruit and vegetables a day.
In 2001, when the NHS started collecting this data as part of the Health Survey for England, 24% of those aged 16 or over ate five or more portions of fruit and veg. Nearly 20 years’ later – that proportion had surged to 28%. It did briefly hit 30%, in 2006, a few years after the official launch of the Five a Day campaign by the Department for Health. But, like Icarus flying too close to the sun, we couldn’t maintain those dizzying heights, and it promptly fell away again.
Facetiousness aside, we shouldn’t understate this – a rise of 4% in this period means an extra 3m people are eating five portions of fruit and vegetables, accounting for population growth. That’s good. But a look at another indicator from the same dataset reveals just how paltry overall progress has been.
An average increase of 0.3 portions a day. To put it in more visual terms, that’s five cherries. A single apricot, or one-sixth of a grapefruit. 0.3 portions of fruit and vegetables is roughly a single stick of celery, or 1.3 heaped tablespoons of kale. It’s two-thirds of a plum.
A portion of fruit and vegetables is 80g. The increase in this period was 24g. That’s a positively homeopathic annual increase in fruit and veg consumption of 1.4g.
The reasons why there’s been virtually no change are many and varied. The rising cost of fruit and vegetables, relative to other items is one, as is the fact that as a population, our disposable income has largely flatlined over much of this period. Cynicism about this kind of messaging and active rejection of nanny-statism might also account for some of the lack of progress. The availability of other, quicker alternatives and our time-pressured lives also helps explain why fruit and veg consumption hasn’t increased. Perhaps most damningly of all, some studies have suggested the health benefits were overstated in the first place.
Most of all, though, it’s indicative of how slowly behaviour changes and how difficult it is to nudge people into behaviour change, particularly the kind of change that’s largely invisible. Smoking has become deeply unfashionable, and is difficult to hide. But no one knows if you aren’t meeting your Five a Day quota (before you ask, not meeting a Five a Day quota doesn’t seem to correlate with obesity).
Perhaps these are the key differences behind the remarkable and continued decline in smoking and the rather less impressive trend in fruit and veg eating. Smoking is directly, obviously bad for you and is a visible habit. That’s less the case with what we eat. There are health benefits of an extra few portions of fruit and veg but they are far less drastic than the risks of smoking, and even if you do stick to it, no one but you will know.
There’s a cautionary tale in this too, given the scale of behaviour change that is required to meet one of the grand challenges of the 21st century: climate change. Meeting Net Zero targets requires virtually everyone to enact some changes in lifestyle, including diet (and food source) energy use and wider consumption. The evidence from our eating habits suggest that a Net Zero target that relies on invisible, optional behaviour change will fail, badly.