Professor Aedín Cassidy

Well, our public health message is very much about eating more fruit and veg and we should be eating at least five to seven servings a day.

But colour is important because not all fruit and vegetables have the same health benefits.

And the current advice is really very generic and nonspecific.

And our research suggests that it's compounds in red, blue and purple coloured fruits and veg that are important for health.

So it's actually very easy and simple to incorporate because it's foods like berries and plums, aubergines and anything that's red and blue in colour.

Anthocyanins, well done.

So, I mean, we think that the flavonoids are probably the compounds that are responsible for some of the health benefits that we're seeing for fruits and vegetables, particularly these coloured fruits.

But flavonoids are naturally occurring compounds in many of the plant foods that we eat in our normal diet.

They're present in tea, which, of course, we drink a lot of, but also in berries and citrus and in apples.

But then these anthocyanins are one of the classes of flavonoids, and they're responsible for that lovely red-blue colour that you get in the plums and berries and grapes.

So, I mean, they have a lot of effects on the body.

So they lower our blood pressure.

They reduce our cholesterol levels.

They reduce inflammation.

But they also support things like blood vessel health and help maintain our glucose and insulin levels.

And what we did in this study was we've been working in this area for probably 15, 20 years now.

And we basically pulled together all of the available high quality data.

to try and see, well, in what direction are we going?

So it would give quite strong evidence that these are important for heart health and for reducing your risk of type 2 diabetes.

Yeah, I mean, that's the great thing is that one, they're present in foods that we eat already.