Norman Swan

And of course, you're going to tell me what indeed is a fruit and what's a vegetable.

There's a diet in America called the DASH diet, which is a diet designed to prevent high blood pressure and to prevent coronary heart disease, which is vegetables, not much red meat and so on.

It's tres mediterranei.

And an advance on that is the, or if you call it an advance, is the mind diet, where they emphasize green leafy vegetables like kale and they emphasize berries, and particularly strawberries, but also blueberries as well.

So I've been, what the heck, what's the harm?

I'll throw a few blueberries into my yogurt in the morning.

Trying to help my brain.

And Jamie is probably eating fruit and doesn't realize it.

So it doesn't have to grow in a tree.

So it doesn't have to be sweet is really the name of the game.

I think the nutritional guidelines take a pragmatic view is that we don't think of tomatoes as fruit because they're not sweet and therefore they lump them into the vegetable category because if they were to put it in the fruit category, there would be this sort of dissonance.

People say, what the hell are you talking about here?

Yeah.

And rather than just getting on with it and eating tomatoes.

What we tend to ignore in the nutritional guidelines is the fact that you cook vegetables.

There's a cuisine attached to them.

And it turns out that when you say, this is research done in Melbourne, if you take a raw tomato and you chop it and add olive oil, that starts to get some bioactive compounds being produced.

If you add vinegar to that, in other words, a vinaigrette, even more.

And if you heat it, in other words, if you cook the tomato, you get even more bioactive compounds being released.

So you shouldn't necessarily think of vegetables as being raw because in the cuisine, particularly the Mediterranean cuisine, probably just by accident through time, it produces very potent bioactive compounds which help your immune system, etc., etc., etc.