Role of fruit juice in achieving the 5-a-day recommendation for fruit and vegetable intake

Although there is strong evidence that consumption of fruit and vegetables is associated with a reduced rate of all-cause mortality, only a minority of the population consumes 5 servings a day, and campaigns to increase intake have had limited success. This review examines whether encouraging the consumption of fruit juice might offer a step toward the 5-a-day target. Reasons given for not consuming whole fruit involve practicalities, inconvenience, and the effort required. Psychologically, what is important is not only basic information about health, but how individuals interpret their ability to implement that information. It has been argued that fruit juice avoids the problems that commonly prevent fruit consumption and thus provides a practical means of increasing intake and benefitting health through an approach with which the population can readily engage. Those arguing against consuming fruit juice emphasize that it is a source of sugar lacking fiber, yet juice provides nutrients such as vitamin C, carotenoids, and polyphenols that offer health-related benefits. Actively encouraging the daily consumption of fruit juice in public health policy could help populations achieve the 5-a-day recommendation for fruit and vegetable intake.

The Effect of Healthy Diet on Cognitive Performance Among Healthy Seniors - A Mini Review

At present, a healthy diet appears to be one of the suitable strategies in slowing down cognitive decline in the process of aging. A number of evidence-based studies confirm its efficacy, safety, and cost-effectiveness. The aim of this mini review is to evaluate and describe recent randomized clinical and cohort studies exploring the effect of healthy diet on cognitive performance among healthy seniors, as well as to update the existing information on this research issue. For these reasons, the authors reviewed full-text, peer-reviewed journal articles written in English and available in Web of Science and PubMed between September 2017 and February 2020. Altogether nine original studies were detected. The results indicate that healthy diet and healthy diet components generally have a positive impact on the enhancement of cognitive functions. Furthermore, the findings reveal that dietary patterns, as well as single nutrients might have a significant effect on specific cognitive domains, such as memory in general, episodic memory, or processing speed. It also seems that a strict adherence to the dietary patterns and a higher diet variety have a more significant effect on the improvement of cognitive functions. Nevertheless, there seem to be gender differences in dietary behavior. More recently, personalized dietary interventions started to be used in delaying cognitive decline among healthy seniors. Therefore, more randomized control trials or N-of-1 trials should be performed in this research area in order to detect the most suitable dietary pattern or nutrients, which would, together with other modifiable lifestyle factors, contribute to the improvement of quality of life of the aging population.