The World Health Organisation recommends that a minimum of 400 grams (or nearly one pound) of fruit and vegetables should be eaten every day to maximise health and wellbeing.
Plant based foods include a whole host of health benefits, and consumption of a variety of foods such as bananas, apricots, celery, peas, beans, broccoli and carrot every day helps prevent a range of lifestyle related diseases.
In a recent WHO study, 1.
7 million deaths of people worldwide per year were attributable to a lack of plant foods in the diet.
Consumption of non-animal foods such as fruit and vegetables helps prevent diseases such as heart disease, cancer, diabetes, obesity and micronutrient deficiencies.
Multivitamins have only been demonstrated to be of possible assistance when dietary intake of vitamins and minerals is insufficient.
Multivitamins cannot replace the complexity of the micronutrients available in bio-available forms such as plant foods, and cannot replace the fibre content available in plant based foods.
Dr Terry Wahls, developer of the Wahls Protocol, has studied in depth of the eating benefits of a diet that is highly nutritious and organic foods such as paleo and green foods.
She had a chronic disease that had left her very disabled, and through studying the science of nutrition, was able to reverse the side effects of the disease, and was able to obtain her mobility and health, after developing a diet that was high in nutritional quality.
Ideally, organic fruit and vegetables are highly nutritious, and farmed using sustainable agriculture.
However if a person is unable to afford to obtain plant sources of food in their organic form, regularly farmed varieties should be washed and scrubbed to remove any chemicals used in their production such as pesticides.
If a family is able to, they can grow their own veggies and small varieties of citrus and apple, and a container garden can be used if a person or family is living in an apartment.
Many cities and communities also have shared organic gardens, where groups of people get together and work in a garden to share fruit and vegetable production.
Many people give testimonies of the benefits of following a detoxification program, where they consume a large quantity of plant origin foods, and minimise the intake of processed food.
However, doing a detox and then going back to a large quantity of processed food serves to reverse the health effects of going on a detox program, so it is recommended to maintain a consistent degree of health and sustain a constant intake of fruit and vegetables in order to maintain health and wellbeing.
When choosing different consumption of fruit and vegetables, aim to "eat the rainbow," and different health promotion programs suggest the consumption of two fruit and five vegetables per day (not including potatoes and other starchy tubers).
When consuming a variety of different foods such as oranges, bananas, apricots, nectarines, broccoli, peppers, watermelon, beans, snap peas and carrot and other such foods, you are maximising the widest possible exposure for a variety of micronutrients, in order to maintain excellent metabolism and efficient cellular function.