When Eva Humphries first began working as a nutritionist, she met a client who had just been diagnosed with high blood pressure and high cholesterol and was on the brink of type 2 diabetes. He had no idea how to change his diet or lifestyle. The man broke down and cried for 45 minutes, leaving Humphries feeling “at a loss,” she says. In the last 15 minutes of the session, searching for something quick but useful to say, she finally told him: “When you look at a plate of food, can you just make half of it vegetables for me?” The client came back two months later and “the colour was back in his cheeks,” she says. He told her that adding the vegetables had “started to make him feel really good.”
It’s a simple approach to eating more plants—and one we might all need to start copying, sooner rather than later. Earlier this month, a new report found that, because of declining soil quality, crops including carrots, apples and peas are now 20% to 50% less nutritious than they were in the 1960s. So should we be eating twice as much?
When I was a child, the “five a day” mantra for fruit and vegetables was drilled into me, and as an adult I thought I was doing fine. I’m vegetarian, which means most of my meals centre on plant-based foods; I subscribe to a vegetable delivery service from a local community farm; and I often snack on apples. I actually do eat my five a day most of the time—and often more than that.
But even before these findings, research suggested we should aim for 10 portions of fruit and vegetables a day instead of five, while some experts recommend eating 30 different plants a week. Eating—and affordably sourcing—that kind of volume can feel overwhelming, and the news about declining nutritional value is potentially discouraging.
William Summers, senior associate at Deep Science Ventures, which published the new report alongside the charity the Mark Leonard Trust, hopes the findings will make farmers and policymakers consider and prioritise nutrient density. In the meantime, he doesn’t want people to think there’s no point in eating plants. His research has shown that “whole foods, across cereals, fruit and vegetables, have definitely become less nutrient-dense. That’s a fact—but they’re still far, far better than eating ultra-processed foods.”
“There are certain vegetables that are known to be more nutrient-dense, and that’s tied to their genetics,” he adds. “Broadly, it’s leafy greens. So I’d say the more leafy greens you can get into your diet, the better.”
According to last year’s National Diet and Nutrition Survey, only 17% of UK adults get their five a day, which can include fruit, vegetables, beans and pulses. So how can we eat more plants without really trying?
A first step could be swapping meat for beans in meals you already make. Dr Shireen Kassam, visiting professor of plant-based nutrition at the University of Winchester and executive director of Plant-Based Health Professionals UK, suggests swapping a tofu curry for a chicken curry, or a lentil bolognese for one made with mince. Even if you don’t want to give up meat entirely, a “half and half” meat and lentil bolognese is a good way to sneak in vegetables without completely changing the flavour, she says.
Matt Beardmore, executive chef at the Italian restaurant Legare, also uses pasta sauces to pack in vegetables. At his restaurant the focus is on taste, but at home, to get the maximum nutrition, he doubles or triples the amount of sofrito (an onion, celery and carrot base for sauces) that he normally puts into a recipe. As the weather gets colder, Kassam and Beardmore both recommend soups as a way to use up any sad-looking leftovers in your vegetable drawer. With a soup such as minestrone, “you can just absolutely”Fill it with veg,” Beardmore says. His rule of thumb is to fill half his plate with vegetables, which is what Humphries suggests too. The approach she used with the unhappy client at the start of her career has become a guiding principle for how she works now. “It’s this idea of: if we look at a plate visually, can we just add a couple more pieces of veg, or maybe some herbs or a handful of greens? I think we underestimate how much small habits like adding an extra portion of vegetables can do.”
The next step, says Humphries, is to diversify your intake so you get as many different minerals and vitamins as possible. “We tend to fall into a routine of eating broccoli, peppers and peas,” she says. One question she asks her clients is: “When was the last time you had watercress? Or when was the last time you added a handful of fresh parsley on top of your food?” Fresh herbs are concentrated sources of nutrients, she says, so you don’t need much to benefit. The idea is to get people thinking about easy ways to add new vegetables and other plants to the diet they already have.
One plant we could eat more of in the UK is seaweed, says Humphries, especially because it contains iodine, one of the minerals Deep Science Ventures flagged as having been lost from our soils. “It’s got loads of iodine, iron, calcium and magnesium,” she says. “It’s one of those plant foods we don’t often think about.” You don’t need much seaweed to get the benefits, so eating a bit of sushi, which often includes a dried version called nori, will do the job. “I tend to use it in seasonings because it has quite a salty flavour,” says Humphries.
How we cook fruit and vegetables matters too. “Vitamins C and B tend to be lost from vegetables if you boil them,” says Humphries. “C is broken down by heat, and a lot of the B vitamins leach into the water.” On the other hand, some vegetables actually improve when boiled: “Take iron in spinach, for example. We can barely absorb any iron from raw spinach, but we can absorb it really well when it’s cooked or boiled.”
Neither Humphries nor Kassam recommends worrying too much about cooking methods, though—eating more vegetables is the main thing. “For most people, the basic message stays the same: five a day is the minimum,” says Kassam. If you can manage more, that will serve your body well.
To get the most nutrients from the food you already eat, choose wholegrain varieties wherever you can—”reducing reliance on refined grains and going for brown rice, brown pasta,” Kassam says. One surprising thing Kassam and Humphries tell me is that soaking beans and pulses before cooking can also increase their bioavailability, helping you absorb more nutrients from them.
Beans may be a great source of selenium and zinc, but it can be hard for us to actually absorb those minerals if they haven’t been soaked for a long time or cooked very slowly, Humphries explains. That’s because beans contain phytates, which are “anti-nutrients, and their main job is to bind minerals,” she says. “So when we eat beans or grains, we can’t fully absorb those minerals because they’re bound to these phytates. The only way around it is to do things like soak beans overnight. That tricks the plant into thinking it’s about to sprout, and it releases the phytates.”
This is great news if you have the time and capacity to plan ahead and prep your beans.Most of us buy beans in cans or jars. According to Humphries, most ready-to-eat canned beans have been boiled quickly, so while they’re still good for you, you’re not getting the maximum nutritional benefit that way. For a convenient alternative, Humphries recommends Bold Bean Co, which sells pre-soaked, slow-cooked beans in jars—but these cost about four times as much as supermarket own-brand cans.
The most nutritious option often comes at a price, says Humphries, who admits she can’t afford to eat 100% organic produce even though she’d like to. Does choosing organic actually make a nutritional difference? “Our data on organic isn’t particularly brilliant,” she says. But she wants people to know that “when we metabolise pesticides or any kind of artificial chemicals left on our food, we use nutrients to detox it”—so there is a case for pesticide-free produce helping us retain more nutrients.
If you can afford to buy organic and local, that’s great, says Humphries, “because we know that having a farmer down the road who really cares about supporting their local community is ultimately supporting more than nutritional wellbeing—it’s supporting our local economy. We also know that once things are picked, they start losing nutrients fairly rapidly. So having access to fresher produce does have merit.”
For this reason, if you can grow your own fruit, vegetables and herbs in your garden or on your windowsill, you’re likely to get more of the plants’ nutrients before they start degrading. That’s probably “the one advantage,” nutrition-wise, that has been proven when it comes to homegrown versus shop-bought, according to Summers. “There isn’t a huge body of evidence, but from what there is, there don’t appear to be any reliable differences” other than “simply freshness,” he says. “The sooner you either eat or preserve it, the better.”
“Ultimately, as a nutritionist, my heart lies with: ‘get the vegetables in'”—in whatever way is affordable and manageable—says Humphries. While Kassam would recommend swapping sugary snacks for fruits, nuts and crudités (the third one to pack in even more vegetables outside meals), “ultimately we have to recognise that unhealthy calories are cheaper than healthy calories,” she says. She points to the Food Foundation’s most recent Broken Plate report, which showed that a fifth of UK households would need to spend 85% of their income on food to afford the government-recommended healthy diet, and that the price gap between healthier and less healthy food is now the widest it has been in over a decade.
Because of this, Kassam says, “people don’t always make active choices: their choices are made in the food environment—what’s affordable, what’s familiar. We need to be representing healthier options in our supermarkets and incentivising those purchases.”
There are ways to maximise your plant consumption a bit more cheaply: frozen vegetables still count, and sometimes even contain more nutrients than fresh ones. “There are cases where rapidly freezing veg will give better nutritional quality than fresh veg that has been sitting around long enough to degrade,” says Summers.
“I tend to stash three to four different types of vegetables in my freezer,” Humphries says, so she always has a handful of spinach or peas to add to her meals.
If you have room, keeping a store cupboard full of “tins of beans and wholegrains and things that are always going to make a nutritious meal” is also a good, relatively cheap way to ensure you always have plant foods on hand, even if you haven’t got anything”Eating fresh is important,” says Kassam. But she adds that any increase in fruit and vegetable intake is beneficial. “We’re not talking about being perfect.”
Frequently Asked Questions
FAQs The Joy of VegMaxxing
1 What does vegmaxxing actually mean
Its a playful term for packing as many vegetables into your day as possibleideally without overhauling your life Think small automatic additions rather than strict diets
2 Where did the term come from
It borrows the maxxing suffix from internet slang meaning to optimize something Vegmaxxing just means optimizing your veg intake
3 How many vegetables should I be eating
Most guidelines suggest around 23 cups of vegetables a day for adults depending on age sex and activity level Vegmaxxing aims to make hitting that easy
4 What counts as a vegetable
Botanically lots of things are fruits but for nutrition purposes they count as vegetables So do leafy greens roots stalks and legumes in many frameworks
5 Do potatoes count
Yes though theyre starchy so treat them as one veg among many rather than your whole quota
6 Whats the single easiest way to start
Add one vegetable to a meal you already eatspinach in your pasta sauce grated carrot in your chili frozen peas in your rice No new recipes required
7 What does without really trying mean in practice
It means using stealth methods frozen veg prechopped options blending and hiding veg in foods you already love so it doesnt feel like a chore
8 Is frozen veg as good as fresh
Usually yesits frozen at peak ripeness and keeps most nutrients Its also cheaper and lasts longer which makes vegmaxxing much easier
9 What are some stealth vegmaxxing tricks
Grate zucchini into muffins blend cauliflower into mac and cheese sauce add pureed squash to tomato sauce swap half your rice for riced broccoli and toss greens into smoothies
10 Can I vegmaxx at breakfast
Absolutely Add spinach to eggs top toast with avocado and tomato stir pumpkin into oatmeal or blend a handful of greens into a smoothie
11 What if I dont like the taste of vegetables
Start with mild ones car
