Health Prose: A One-Minute Update for Your Health

Holiday Foods: Add To Your Menu With Fruits And Vegetables

The holiday season often brings more than good cheer: It tempts you with high-fat menus. If you want to eat well while still getting your fill of Thanksgiving turkey, stuffing, and pumpkin pie, try the "Five-a-Day Program."

"Under the Five-a-Day Program, you try to eat five servings of fruits and vegetables each day," says Phyllis Stumbo, head research dietitian at the University of Iowa College of Medicine Clinical Research Center. "The program was developed by the National Cancer Institute because eating fruits and vegetables appear to reduce the risk of cancer."

Incorporating more fruits and vegetables into the Thanksgiving meal may help you eat less of high-calorie foods such as meats and desserts, Stumbo says, You can still serve traditional Thanksgiving Day foods, but you can also offer five servings of fruits and vegetables by including sweet potatoes, mashed potatoes, broccoli or spinach, pumpkin pie, and hot apple cider on your menu.

Stumbo also offers a number of suggestions on how to prepare foods so that they are low in added fats and sugars. First, bake sweet potatoes rather than candy them, and make mashed potatoes with low-fat milk and a minimum of butter or sour cream. Changing the way you prepare the pumpkin pie can also greatly reduce dietary fat. "The pumpkin in pumpkin pie is very nutritious, but the pie crust is the highest source of fat of almost all desserts," Stumbo notes. "You can really reduce the fat intake by serving pumpkin filling in custard cups instead of in pastry shells." Another way to reduce the fat in pumpkin pie is to use 2% milk instead of the canned evaporated milk most recipes call for. That can reduce the fat content by two-thirds, she says.

Hot apple cider, a traditional holiday drink, is a delicious fruit beverage, Stumbo adds, but be sure you don't oversweeten it. Use a minimal amount of brown sugar or serve it unsweetened. Apple juice is not rich in vitamin A but the benefit from vitamin A from fruit and vegetables in cancer prevention is in doubt because supplementation with vitamin A in pill form was not affective. Therefore it is best not to presume that any paricular component in fruits and vegetables is the effective agent.

"One reason people aren't aware of the benefits of fruits and vegetables is because they come without a label," Stumbo says, "We all know that cereal is a good source of fiber because the cardboard box has lots of room for printing that information." One goal of the Five-a-Day Program is to make nutritional information on fruits and vegetables available to consumers, she adds.

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See related Patient Topics Food, Nutrition and Metabolism, Nutrition or Wellness and Lifestyle.

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