Fruits and vegetables versus Ready meals

About the effectiveness of food campaigns

If one asks a French person whether he knows a slogan about nutrition, there is good chance he will answer: "Mangez cinq fruits et légumes par jour !" ("Eat five fruits and vegetables a day").
In many countries, health agencies have been insisting a lot about the importance of fruits and vegetables in everyday diet. They are indeed related to many of the issues we've considered earlier: they are the primary source of fibers and many vitamins and other nutrients, and contains low amounts of fast sugars and fats. In France, this campaign started in 2007, more than ten years ago, and people from the younger generation spent a great part, if not whole, of their education time surrounded by such slogans. Yet people who manage to actually reach this objective of 5 are very rare, as shown on the graph below.

In particular there is a large majority of workers and students that are eat less than half the recommendation! This correlates very well with the discrepancies observed for vitamin C. The retirees and the corporate managers seem to be eating more fruits and vegetables than the other classes, even though the objective remains globally pretty far.

The great enemy: Ready meals

There are more and more warnings about what some experts call "ultra-processed food". Those meals, like ready-made soups, sauces or industrial pizzas are known to be nutrients-poor, but can sometimes be downright harmful because of additives and added-sugars. One of the idea we had when analyzing the ANSES study was to try to determine whether or not some groups in the population were more prone to consume this kind of food. Yet the results were not significant, either because this topic was not among the goals of the study, or because these meals are actually consumed equally by the different social classes. Since ready meals can be harmful for both health and budget (they are usually way more expensive than the home-made equivalent), it would be interesting to design studies targeting this precise point.