Do you get your recommended fruits & veggies a day?

I saw an infomercial on the Magic Bullet (which my room mate bought in college and it broke the very FIRST time she used it) and one of the actors says that "nobody eats like that" referring to having 5 servings of fruits & veggies a day. 

 I wanted to hear from you. Do you get your recommended 5 cups of fruits and veggies a day? What are they? If you don't...what are you eating instead?

 I am curious because I was blown away by the accusation. I know that as long as I eat my 2000 cals a day then I am definitly fufilling my servings. I have only had breakfast and I have already eaten  1 1/2 of my serving so of veggies.

I eat more than 5 servings per day. I aim for 7-9 just of veggies and generally eat 1-2 servings of fruit on top of that. Total is then 8-11 servings of fruit and veggies per day. Days that I fall short of my goal I almost always get at least 5 servings.

I don't take vitamins, so it's really important for me to concentrate on fresh veggies.

I also eat more than the recommended servings of fruit and vegetables a day. I think people forget how small the serving sizes are for all foods, and that includes fruit and vegetables.

It's not like you have to eat five quarts of fruit/veggies to get your servings in :-)

Depending on how specifically I define "serving" for various vegetables, I usually get around 10-15 servings of vegetables a day ... and maybe one serving of fruit.

For example, my dinner tonight includes:

one cup of chopped radishes

one cup of cherry tomatoes, halved

three servings of shredded cabbage (one bag)

three whole, medium onions (chopped and grilled)

(In my estimation, that's 8 servings of veggies .... assuming one whole onion equals a serving. If a serving is 1/2 an onion .... add three more servings to my 8 and that gives me 11 .... just for dinner. Lunch was 7 servings, by the way.)

=^..^= MOLLY (Visit our October VEGGIE Challenge thread in Motivation!)

I've had about six servings of vegetables alone today...but most days I get in about seven or eight. I ALWAYS have fruit as one or two of my snacks, and at each meal.

Also, I never eat the same fruit of vegetable twice in one day; everybody needs variety.

I'm always at five at the very least...

I usually have two apples a day for my snacks, and when I have a sandwich for lunch I put a cup of spinach on it.  

Eat some carrot  sticks instead of pretzel sticks for lunch. 

For breakfast have a cup of milk with a cup of frozen unsweetened strawberries and a banana...that's two.

Have celery halves with some healthy peanut butter for snack. 

But, before dieting...I know I wasn't getting 2 servings a day, let alone any more.  But now its easy.

I eat a giant salad for lunch, a great big smoothie for breakfast, the occasional fruit or veg to munch on here and there, and dinner with lots of cooked veggies. I'd say, based on the absurdly small serving sizes that the USDA pushes (1/2 of a large apple is 1 serving of fruit), I get somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 to 15 servings of fruit and veg in a given day. Once I get back home to my utensils and my kitchen scale, I'll try to see if that's about right.

Of course, I'm a vegan so that helps. 

 

I'm at 2 for fruit and probably 2 for veggies if veggie burgers count.  I seem to be eating at least 2 veggie burgers a day.  I expect I'll probably get another fruit and at least 2 more veggies in by the end of today.

This is about average for me these days. 

 

Never. Vegetables gag me. I put spinach in my breakfast smoothie and that helps some, but I can't eat them straight.

Fruit I do ok on though =]]

I wanna eat the right amount of fruits and veggies, but it's hard to get them into the house sometimes.  A lot of times, especially if money is tight, people act like I'm wasting money if I wanna bring anything actually healthy into the house.

A good place to check your servings and see helpful ways to make sure you get them is Mypyramid.gov I recommend using this site as a helpful tool to check your daily needs!! KAL

Original Post by kalugin:

A good place to check your servings and see helpful ways to make sure you get them is Mypyramid.gov I recommend using this site as a helpful tool to check your daily needs!! KAL

Ugh...  Sorry but the mypyramid site is put out by the USDA.  The USDA's main goal is to help the agriculture industry make as much money as possible.  That coupled with the fact that the meat and dairy industry have hundreds of millions of dollars to use to sway the USDA (and consumers, we've all seen got milk ads, when was the last time you saw a eat more watermelon ad?) means that the USDA has an extreme conflict of interest.

Honestly, what business does the United States Department of Agriculture have in giving out nutrition recommendations? 

Sorry, the tone of the above is a bit snarky huh?  It wasn't directed towards you kalugin.  It's just a bit frustrating for this idealist to see the machine chewing away at our health.