“Nutritionists always recommend eating more fruits and vegetables. Your suggestion to aim for five servings a day is a helpful rule of thumb. But does this only include colorful fruits and vegetables, or does it also include nuts, beans, and potatoes? If not, how many servings per day of those is recommended?”
Nuts, beans, and potatoes are (obviously) all plants. But, the categories that we use in nutrition science and dietary guidelines don’t line up with botanical designations. Rather, foods are sorted by their nutritional function. So, for example, while a zucchini may technically be a fruit, we still consider it a vegetable. (The sorting of produce into fruits and vegetables is mostly around sugar content.)
Nutritionally speaking, potatoes are much more similar to things like pasta, bread, or rice than they are to tomatoes or lettuce. So, I tend to include those in the category of starches and grains.
Nuts and beans each occupy different places/functions in the healthy diet. Beans are much higher in protein than other vegetables (and, accordingly, play a very important role in the diet of vegetarians) so they are generally categorized as a protein food. While nuts are usually included in lists of protein foods for vegetarians, they are actually much higher in fat than protein. And so you’ll often see nuts grouped with other sources of healthy fats, and recommended in smaller portions.
Another example of how nutritional and botanical categories often differ is that peanuts are technically legumes. But we generally lump them in with nuts because of their nut-like fat content.
Unlike fruits and vegetables, which are recommended on a daily basis, the dietary guidelines suggest including 3 servings of beans and 5 servings of nuts a week as part of your portfolio of protein foods. Vegetarians would likely consume much more than that to make up for the meat and seafood they don’t eat.
And meat-eaters could certainly consume more than that, too. People who include beans and nuts in their diets on a more regular basis tend to have healthier diets (and lower disease risks) overall.
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