Your ‘five-a-day' can now include chocolate and red wine, study finds
A new five-a-day diet including tea, apples, oranges and berries − all foods rich in chemicals called flavonoids – will help people to live longer, a study has found.
Flavonoids have a range of benefits, including lowering high blood pressure. Scientists have long known them to be good for health, but the new study is the first to investigate the benefits of a diversity of different flavonoids, not just the quantity.
There are five main groups of flavonoids covering dozens of unique chemicals, but one main tranche is anthocyanins, found in abundance in grapes and red wine.
Tea is rich in flavan-3-ols, another flavonoid, while orange juice is full of flavonones, and kale has high levels of flavones.
Some foods, such as apples and tea, contain several flavonoids of different categories.
Scientists looked at the benefits of a diversity of these chemicals in a person's diet by assessing almost 125,000 Britons enrolled in the UK Biobank. Specific food and drink intake was compared to health outcomes over a decade of follow-up by scientists at Queen's University Belfast.
Participants who consumed at least 1,000 milligrams of flavonoids a day were a fifth less likely to die during the study period, data showed, confirming that flavonoid quantity was linked to better health.
Further analysis on the impact of flavonoid diversity found people in the lowest 20pc of the study consumed on average just one food product which was rich in flavonoids a day.
Those in the top 20pc who ate five portions of flavonoid-rich foods a day were found to have a 16pc lower risk of death during the study period.
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