Why don’t we eat more fruit and vegetables?

It's exercised my mind for many years, and given the title of this journal, is worth exploring.

A recently-released survey by the National Health and Medical Research Council showed that a staggering 96 per cent of us don’t eat the recommended daily amount.

We’re obviously not getting the message across, so where to from here?

I remember a pop song from my teenage years, which went: “If it’s something you enjoy you can be certain that, it’s illegal, it’s immoral or it makes you fat.”

Today, there is no doubt about the last point. Every time I go shopping, I can’t avoid the fact that most people in the supermarket are overweight and many grossly obese -men and women.

I’m sure you see the same.

As you know, I work a fair amount with school children, and it’s the same there.

So presumably most people enjoy eating food which makes them fat.

This raises the question – why?

Some of the answers are given in a perceptive article in New Scientist (November 21) by Chloe Lambert, entitled “Gut Thinking”.

As she says: “On a basic level our relationship with food is simple – signals between the gut and the brain tell us when we’re hungry and when we are full."

"But experience shows that the drive to eat is much more tangled and irrational.

"Some of that is down to the reward hit – the feeling of pleasure, mediated by the brain’s reward centre – that we get from eating calorie dense food like a glistening doughnut.

"Indeed, the effect of such foods has led some to liken our desire for them to drug addiction.”

She goes on:

"What, when, and how much we eat has been typically explained by two systems in the brain, on based on hunger and one on reward … the reward system is concerned with what type of food we eat.

"At its heart is the dopamine pathway, which seems to respond most strongly to foods that are high in fat and sugar.

"This is natural and necessary – it evolved to prompt us to seek such food, helping us to survive … in our modern environment where food is abundant and cheap, the reward system may be pushing us towards eating sweet and fat foods, even though we already have plentiful energy stores.”

Susan Roberts, from Tufts University in Massachusetts, is reported as saying it’s possible to retrain our brains to desire different foods.

“There’s a cabal of obesity researchers who have turned up their hands and said the only thing you can do is rely on willpower," she says.

"I don’t think it’s worked for the last 30 years and it’s not going to work next year either, which is why we’re trying to do it in a different way.”

This is not specified (watch this space), so maybe we should get back to that pop song.

The challenge is to make eating fruit and vegetables “illegal” and "immoral” so that you can enjoy.

As a start, it might be an idea to scrap those media pieces which extol the health benefits of fresh fruit and vegetables.

These can be seen as not only legal but also moral – boring (but “an apple a day keeps the doctor away” had some impact, even if the doctors didn’t like it).

“Illegal” is a challenge, but “immoral” has more opportunities. Hmm.

I remember “Baby Cham” in my university days.

Perry, a cider made from pear juice, was not selling well so it was rebranded.

It had to be served with a cherry floating on top (and that helped the fruit industry) and was aimed unashamedly at the female market. At twice the price…

“I’d love a Baby Cham,” said the girl in the TV ads as she gazed at the camera – wink, wink.

It became the drink of choice to ply your new girlfriend with. I’ll say no more.

As to vegetables, my Ph.D supervisor made a name for himself in an interview on BBC Radio’s “Women’s Hour” with the statement: “What British housewives are looking for is a finger-sized carrot”.

The 5 million or so listeners roared with laughter, but he was a bluff Yorkshire man and kept a straight face– this was 1966, remember.

It happened again only a few years ago in the USA.

School kids had been asked to re-badge vegetables. They came up with “Green Gremlins” for brussel sprouts, but to follow on from the last story, carrots became “the original orange doodle”.

Sales rocketed.

What are Australian school kids exposed to? I spend a fair time in schools, and I’ve yet to see fruit and vegetables as a reward for whatever– it’s usually a plate of biscuits with a chocolate cover impregnated with sweet “hundreds and thousands”.

I showed my daughter an early draft of this article and she commented:

“I’m constantly battling the sweets reward system – at the doctors, at the hairdresser (would Charlotte or Reuben like a lollypop for being a good girl/boy?)"

"It makes me smile that for Charlie, her big ‘reward’ is a cup of Greek yoghurt, with no sugar or additives, with sprinkles on top… chia seeds!  Roo is the same.

"It has to start when we’re kids, or we’re screwed.”

So, maybe we should follow the American lead and get our kids to jazz up fruit and vegetables to get them to eat more of them.

The website www.childrensfoodeducation.org.au is a very good start.

I received a positive reply from the executive director when I asked her what was going on in Australia.

This is part of what she said:

“Perhaps for context you could explain that we concentrate on the psycho-social aspects of food (the fun bit) and encourage active learning about other food related issues like the environment or farming which provides a broader (less boring) context than dietetics."

"In fact, we try to avoid using the word 'healthy' at all and find other motivators work better for behaviour change and mindfulness.

"As for ‘jazzing up’ fruit and vegetables, we certainly encourage calling them playful names.

"It would be great if they never really specifically mentioned healthy food in schools again, but rather just adhered to some health – based principles via food service in canteens and got their communities into gardening.”

That’s Charlie in the photo at the top of the article.

She’s part of the next generation. Hopefully many more will follow her taste.

If not, that depressing sight in the supermarket will continue.