Eating Fruits and Vegetables May Not Help with Weight Loss
Fruits and vegetables have traditionally been credited as leading weight loss foods. However, a new study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition has found that they may not be as helpful for curing obesity as originally thought.
Study Design
The study that was published by nearly 50 researchers from the Imperial College London. These researchers studied nearly 400,000 participants from ten separate European countries. The study was of particular interest to the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition.
The participants asked participants what their fruit and vegetable intake was. They compared their fruit and vegetable intake to the baseline consumption of 100 grams per day. The participants were made up of varying demographics and the study was controlled for a variety of different variables, such as age, gender and calorie consumption.
They then looked for a correlation between fruit and vegetable consumption and weight change. They researchers followed up the participants after five years.
Does Fruit and Vegetable Consumption Contribute to Weight Loss?
The study found that consuming above average quantities of fruits and vegetables appeared to be only indirectly correlated with weight loss. After the researchers factored out participants who had chronic diseases, there was no change in weight gain. This suggested to the researchers that fruits and vegetables could help people lose weight by reducing the likelihood that they developed medical problems that resulted in weight gain.
The data on women was a little more varied than the general sample. Women who consumed more fruits and vegetables were more likely to gain weight if they were already overweight, were former smokers and had good dietary habits. On the other hand, women who were over the age of 50 were slightly more likely to lose weight if they were of normal weight, never smoked and had poor nutritional habits.
[box type=”important”]The researchers concluded that consuming more fruits and vegetables did not help people lose weight when compared to other diets with similar caloric intake. However, that conclusion may not apply to subjects from all demographic groups and lifestyle preferences.[/box]
really interesting researchers made by American Journal of Clinical Nutrition on fruits and vegetable eating but final conclusion we can say that eating more than limits is always harmful weather it is fruits and vegetable.
People are regularly told how many fruit and vegetable servings they are supposed to eat. Researchers ask the how many servings they eat. On average they all eat the same. Or did I miss the part where what they really eat vs. what they report to eat was monitored? I’m not going to draw too many conclusions from this study unless someone has better information on how this was carried out. False reporting, particularly around health, is a well known problem with these types of studies.