When you do your grocery shopping, you’ll probably pick the same fruit and vegetables every week – and, more than likely, you don’t buy enough to give you the recommended five portions a day.

Fruit and vegetables can be a vital natural source of important nutrients as we get older and knowing what’s best to choose from the wide choice isn’t that difficult.

Colour-coded health
According to consultant dietician Aveen Bannon, one way to get a good variety of fruit and vegetables into your diet is to focus on colour. The general advice on meeting the five-portions-a-day quota is to have an array of colour in your food. However, it’s the colour of the flesh and not the skin or peel that indicates its nutritional value.

Green vegetables have the highest content of folic acid, which is important for your heart, and broccoli in particular has potentially protective qualities against prostate cancer. “The greener the vegetable, generally the better it is and generally the more folic acid and vitamin C that will be in it,” Bannon says.

Cabbage, kale and other green vegetables have the same values. “It’s across the board,” she explains. Spinach and broccoli would be the best.

Red fruit and vegetables, such as tomatoes, contain lycopenes. According to Bannon: “Lycopenes are beneficial for the heart and help protect against certain cancers, particularly prostate cancers, so we actually encourage men to have tomato-based food every day.”

Watermelon (green skin but red flesh), red peppers and anything else with that red colour also fall into that category.

“Orangey-coloured fruit and veg are good for vitamin A. Vitamin A can be good as an immune-boosting vitamin and can also be good for your eyesight,” she says.

Orange-fleshed fruit and vegetables include mangoes, sweet potato, peaches, carrots, turnips and oranges. Sweet potato, which is becoming more available in Ireland, is quite good as it has twice the fibre of normal potatoes, Bannon says.

Purple fruit and vegetables tend to be the highest vitamin C. However, there’s something about their regal colouring that makes blueberries, for example, that little bit more expensive. Beetroot is a good alternative.

“Blueberries and blackberries both have nearly four times the vitamin C of an orange. You can get them in season and freeze them as they’re actually fine when they’re frozen and keep them for the year,” she suggests.

White fruit and vegetables include potatoes, cauliflower, apples, onions and garlic. “Garlic, I think is one that would be particularly good. It contains a phytochemical S-allyl and it’s good for the heart and the immune system.”

Apples (white on the inside) are good for the heart, she adds.

Fibre freedom
Apart from being low in calories and full of vitamins and phytochemicals that will protect the heart, Bannon stresses that all fruit and vegetables are good in fibre. This is important for older people with poor mobility, for whom constipation becomes a problem.

Variety
Bannon advises that colour should come into each meal. “The one thing that is important for people is to have a variety of colour and that they don’t get stuck in a rut of eating peas and carrots every day if the week.”

She suggests that, each week, you buy something different, looking at it from a colour point of view. “You will often find you will start enjoying the flavours of some different kind of food.”

Bannon says that those cooking for one can buy frozen vegetables, which keep their nutrition. If you feel that vegetables are going to waste, use them up in a soup or casserole before they go off.

Her last piece of advice is not to leave fruit out of the equation. She says that older people tend to eat less fruit – this may be due to the fact that fruit wasn’t as widely available years ago. However, it is widely available now and can be a handy snack – so go on, nibble a piece of fruit today.