Your ‘five-a-day' now includes chocolate... and wine
For those people who find cramming in five portions of fruit and veg a day about as appealing as limp lettuce, scientists have good news: now you can count red wine and dark chocolate.
A new five-a-day diet including tea, apples, oranges and berries – all foods rich in chemicals called flavonoids - will help people to live longer, a study has found.
Flavonoids have a range of benefits, including lowering high blood pressure and dampening inflammation.
Scientists have long known them to be good for health, but the new study is the first to investigate the benefits of a diversity of different flavonoids, not just the quantity.
There are five main groups of flavonoids covering dozens of unique chemicals, but one main tranche is anthocyanins, found in abundance in grapes and red wine.
Tea is rich in flavan-3-ols, another flavonoid, while orange juice is full of flavonones, and kale has high levels of flavones.
Some foods, such as apples and tea, contain several flavonoids of different categories, while some only contain one.
Scientists looked at the benefits of a diversity of these chemicals in a person's diet by assessing almost 125,000 Britons enrolled in the UK Biobank.
Specific food and drink intake was compared to health outcomes over a decade of follow-up by scientists at Queen's University Belfast.
Participants who consumed at least 1,000 milligrams of flavonoids a day were a fifth less likely to die during the study period, data showed, confirming that flavonoid quantity was linked to better health.
Further analysis on the impact of flavonoid diversity found people in the lowest 20 per cent of the study consumed on average just one food product which was rich in flavonoids a day.
Those in the top 20 per cent who ate five portions of flavonoid-rich foods a day were found to have a 16 per cent lower risk of death during the study period.
Prof Aedín Cassidy, study author and chair in nutrition and preventive medicine at Queen's University Belfast, told The Telegraph: 'A flavonoid 'five-a-day' has the potential to reduce mortality.
'The data suggest that there is a benefit to consuming a wide range of flavonoids beyond that of simply consuming a high quantity as different flavonoids work in different ways, some improve blood pressure, others help with cholesterol levels and decrease inflammation.
'So having a variety of flavonoid-rich foods is important – eg one apple, a handful of berries, two cups of tea, and one orange. Other rich sources are onions, red wine, grapes, plums, and red cabbage.'
People who hit their flavonoid five-a-day were also found to be 10 per cent less at risk of cardiovascular disease, when accounting for factors such as sex, education, BMI, profession, income, alcohol and smoking habits, prior medical history and other aspects of diet.
The cancer risk was also 20 per cent lower for five-a-dayers compared to those who ate just one of their five-a-day, the study found.
Risk of respiratory conditions was eight per cent lower, data showed, and there was no link for neurodegenerative conditions.
'Our findings highlight the importance of consuming a diverse range of flavonoids for the management of chronic disease risk, which, from a public health perspective, provides support for consuming a variety of flavonoid-rich foods such as green and/or black tea, berries, apples, oranges and grapes,' said the study authors in their paper.
'The collective actions of multiple flavonoids appear to lead to greater health protection compared with single subclasses or compounds.
'We found that consuming both a higher quantity and wider diversity of dietary flavonoids appears better for longer-term health than higher intakes of either component alone.'
The study has been published in Nature Food.
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