Browse evidence-based analysis of health-related claims and assertions
People who eat more fruits and veggies also tend to exercise more, not smoke, and eat healthier overall — so it’s hard to say if the fruits and veggies themselves are the reason they live longer.
Correlational
The link between eating more fruits and veggies and living longer holds true whether people live in the US, Europe, or Asia, even if they eat different kinds of produce.
Eating more fruits and veggies doesn’t seem to lower the chance of dying from cancer, based on the available evidence.
People who eat more fruits and veggies have a slightly lower chance of dying from heart disease, and both fruits and veggies contribute to this benefit.
Eating vegetables every day is linked to living longer, but eating more than three servings a day doesn’t help much more.
Eating fruit every day is linked to living longer, but eating more than two servings a day doesn’t make much of a difference.
Eating more fruits and veggies each day is linked to living longer, but eating more than five servings a day doesn't help much more.
Eating more fruit seems to help more than eating more vegetables when it comes to lowering the risk of dying from cancer.
When scientists combined data from 26 big studies with over a million people, they found the same thing: eating five servings of fruits and veggies a day helps people live longer.
Even when researchers accounted for people changing their diet because they were already sick, the link between eating more fruits and veggies and living longer still held up.
Eating more than five servings of fruits and veggies a day doesn’t make you any less likely to die early — five is the sweet spot.
Eating leafy greens, broccoli, oranges, and other colorful fruits and veggies is linked to living longer, likely because they’re packed with good nutrients.
Whether you’re young or old, smoke or don’t, are overweight or not — eating five servings of fruits and veggies a day still helps lower your risk of dying early.
People who eat five servings of fruits and veggies a day are much less likely to die from lung diseases like COPD than those who eat only two servings.
Drinking fruit juice or eating potatoes doesn’t help people live longer — unlike eating whole fruits and vegetables, which do.
Eating starchy veggies like corn and peas doesn’t seem to help people live longer, unlike other fruits and vegetables, which do.
People who eat two pieces of fruit and three servings of vegetables every day have a lower chance of dying from heart disease than those who eat less, but eating more doesn’t help much beyond that.
People who eat about five servings of fruits and veggies a day tend to live longer than those who eat only two, but eating more than five doesn’t make them live any longer.
When shown pictures of their foods, Hadza people picked honey as their favorite and tubers as their least favorite — they really like sweet stuff and don’t care much for roots.
Descriptive
Hadza people don’t really like tubers, but they eat them a lot when berries aren’t around — so tubers are like a backup food when their favorite stuff isn’t available.
When Hadza women eat more tubers, they tend to have less body fat; when they eat more meat, they tend to have more body fat — but this doesn’t mean tubers make you skinny or meat makes you fat, just that the two are linked.
A treatment called IVIg, made from pooled antibodies, helps calm overactive immune systems in autoimmune diseases by turning on a 'brake' receptor called FcγRIIB.
Mechanistic
Inside cells, there’s a sensor (TRIM21) that finds viruses tagged with antibodies, destroys them, and also helps the cell alert killer T cells to attack.
People with two copies of a certain version of a receptor (R131) are more likely to get lupus because that version doesn’t grab onto certain antibodies as well, leading to poor clearance of immune complexes.