Norman Swan

By the way, that study showed up to seven serves a day of fruit and vegetables gives you the highest risk reduction.

But it's a good question to ask because people who are eating fruit and vegetables are more likely to exercise, they're less likely to smoke, they're less likely to drink.

There's a lot of other things going on, but they did try to isolate that in this particular Australian study.

Well, another very large study, which is called the Global Burden of Disease Study.

I need to make a declaration here.

I was in the beginning of this study with World Health Organization and the World Bank, which looks at something called DALYs, Disability Adjusted Life Years.

So not just death, but also how many years you live with disability.

It tried to look at the global burden of disease relative to fruit and vegetable intake.

So the deaths and disease there.

And they felt that a high proportion of premature mortality

was attributable to suboptimal fruit and vegetable intake.

And so if you did actually have adequate intake, you had a reduction in age-related mortality.

In other words, everybody's going to die, but your chances of dying at a given age went down between 35% and 40%.

So a little bit less for fruit than vegetables, but basically the same.

Mostly they've measured with cardiovascular disease.

It's much easier to measure.

But when you're eating a high proportion of fruit and vegetables, you tend not to put on as much weight.

And that's related to lower cancer incidence.

It's also related to lower incidence of type 2 diabetes.

So there are flow-on effects from fruit and vegetables.