When it comes to improving your gut health, you can't go past fresh fruit and veg. Photo / Getty Images
When it comes to improving your gut health, you can't go past fresh fruit and veg. Photo / Getty Images
When Rebecca and David Fryer sign up a new customer to their fruit and vegetable delivery boxes, a familiar request often comes through. "Can we have sweetcorn in our box every week?" Hand-picked on their land just south of Manchester, the Fryers' corn is fresh, delicious and full of nutrients. It also only grows for about five weeks out of every year.
"If you get the right produce at the right time of year, it's full of vitamins and minerals," says Rebecca. "People are starting to understand, but this idea that everything is available all the time – that's just what we've become accustomed to."
The health benefits of eating plants are hard to overstate – filling most of your diet with as many different vegetables as possible (and a good deal of fruit) can help protect against diseases from cancer to dementia. It's also an easy way to maintain a healthy weight and to support your immune system too, by feeding a healthy gut microbiome.
But it's not enough to have an apple a day or to throw some lettuce into the same sandwich. Variety is key, says nutritionist Amelia Freer.
"A variety of produce means a variety of nutrients. It is this that can help to protect us against the risk of nutritional overload or deficiency, and is at the heart of what a balanced diet means."
A good way to ensure you are eating a range of plants throughout the year is to simply follow seasons.
The trouble is, we've become accustomed to being able to buy a wide range of fruit and veg all year round. In its latest series, the Channel 4 programme Secrets of Your Supermarket Food revealed that only 16 per cent of the fruit we consume is grown here. Around 60 per cent of the apples we eat – arguably, the quintessential fruit – are imported. Veg generally fares better – 53 per cent of all the vegetables we eat are grown here – but for some reason we import around one million tonnes of potatoes every year.
With international sourcing, Freer explains, we can now feasibly eat the same five vegetables and five fruits "day-in, day-out for the entire year without so much as a single deviation".
"They are always available, regardless of the journey cost or length, on the supermarket shelves. Yet as humans, we evolved to eat a hugely varied diet, enjoying hundreds (if not thousands) of different plants over the course of the year," she says. "Eating with the seasons forces us to mix it up."
It would be wrong to say there is no nutrition to be found in an imported vegetable, but eating seasonally means you are more likely to be eating produce that is freshly picked at the point of ripeness and transported to your plate in a minimum amount of time.
We've gotten used to having frozen or canned veg available year-round, but there's a reason fresh is best. Photo / Getty Images
"This can help to optimise the concentration of certain micronutrients and phytonutrients contained within the produce," says Freer. "It often tastes better too as crops haven't been selectively bred and grown for their long shelf life and transportability above taste or nutritional value."
Price is clearly a factor behind our reliance on imported fruit and veg, but things are beginning to shift, with 93 per cent of people saying they would be willing to spend more on homegrown produce. Local delivery box schemes are cropping up all over the country and not all of them absurdly expensive.
The Covid-19 pandemic has brought renewed interest in self-sufficiency, with many using lockdowns to try growing their own food and shopping more with local producers and suppliers.
Rebecca Fryer says people are much more interested in where their food comes from.
"You can't guarantee the quality from the supermarket. If it comes from the other side of the world, it's been picked, very quickly put in a fridge and delivered.
"Here, most of our veg is picked so soon before it's delivered that when you get it home, it lasts for ages."
Good for you, good for the economy and good for the planet – eating seasonal veg is a win-win.
Six ways to shop, cook and enjoy more locally grown fruit and veg
• Fill half your plate with vegetables at every meal – even breakfast. It's a rough and simple guideline that works really well to help boost your intake. Good breakfast choices might include spinach, mushrooms, cherry tomatoes or fruit. Choose a simple piece of seasonal fruit for the majority of your desserts, adding a square of dark chocolate or a few nuts if you like.
• Eat vegetables raw, steamed or roasted. Boiling can leach out nutrients
• Healthy fats – such as a vinaigrette – not only taste great on veg, but can boost absorption of certain vitamins.
• Freeze fruit and veg, and buy frozen British veg and fruit such as berries outside of the summer.
• A vegetable box delivery, or a visit to a farmer's market or farm, is a great way to expand our intake of different vegetables.
• Grow your own if you can. It's fun, tastes fantastically fresh and is a good way to appreciate the effort, time and love that goes into producing the food on your plate – which might mean you're less likely to waste
