Fruit and vegetable intake and the risk of cardiovascular disease, total cancer and all-cause mortality
In plain English
A dose-response meta-analysis pooling 95 prospective studies and roughly two million participants mapped exactly how risk falls as fruit and vegetable intake rises. Risk kept declining up to about 800 g a day (ten portions), where cardiovascular disease was 28% lower, cancer 13% lower, and all-cause mortality 31% lower than at near-zero intake. The authors estimated 5.6-7.8 million premature deaths a year worldwide could be attributable to eating fewer than 500-800 g/day.
Why it matters
Up to 800 g/day of fruit and veg was linked to 31% lower mortality — far above the usual '5-a-day'.
Informs: Heart Disease·Cancer·Plant-Based Score·Life Expectancy
Provenance
- Design
- Meta-analysis
- Sample size (n)
- 2,000,000
- Peer-reviewed
- Yes
- Replications
- 2
- Funding
- Public / academic
- Funders
- Imperial College London, Norwegian University of Science and Technology
- Institutions
- Imperial College London, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
decades.plus score
A transparent 0–100 weighted sum across six components. Higher scores reflect bigger, cleaner, more replicated work.
Caveats
Observational; high produce intake clusters with other healthy habits, so causal magnitude is uncertain. The mortality estimate is a modelled population-attributable figure that assumes the associations are causal — a strong assumption no meta-analysis of cohorts can prove.
