EXPLORING VARIETY WITH VEGETABLES

Ghana recently launched the first ever food based dietary guidelines, thanks to a successful collaboration between the School of Public Health, University of Ghana and the Ministry of Food and Agriculture, and supported by several stakeholders. The guideline aims to promote optimal diets to support healthy lifestyles for the population in Ghana from ages five years and above.

One of the core recommendations of the guideline is to ‘Eat a variety of vegetables everyday’. This begs the question of how many different types of vegetables to eat in a day in order to have variety. Whilst the guidelines do not state the specific number of types of vegetables to eat in order to achieve variety, it clearly emphasizes the need to include green leafy vegetables and brightly coloured vegetables in the diet.

Regarding quantities, the guidelines recommend eating a minimum of 5 servings of a variety of vegetables every day. For the purpose of this article, we define one serving of vegetables as any of the following;

• One soup ladleful of boiled vegetables
• Two soup ladles of any raw vegetable
•   ½ cup cooked vegetables
• 1 cup of any raw vegetable

*For serving sizes of specific local vegetables you can see the Ghana food-based dietary guidelines

Although these amounts may seem like a big target at first glance for some people, it can be achievable in practical terms. Let’s take a real-life example; Salma, a busy salesgirl, who is approaching her late 20s has taken a decision to eat an optimal diet to support a healthy lifestyle. She plans to include 5 servings of a variety of vegetables in her meal plan today.  Let’s see how she achieves this.

She eats breakfast at home, usually tea and bread. Today, she decides to chop up some onions and tomatoes (up to 1 cup) and toss together with vinegar to make a simple salad to have as part of her breakfast. For lunch she buys waakye (rice and beans), served with tomato gravy and a hot pepper sauce) from the vendor near her office. Today, she deliberately buys a generous portion of the chopped vegetables (the equivalent of one cup) the food vendor sells, to eat with her waakye.

She arrives home late after work and decides to have just soup (prepared over the weekend and stored in her freezer). To meet her vegetable intake recommendations, she chops up some fresh okro into chunks, steams them and adds to her soup (2 ladles).

Let’s analyse Salma’s vegetable intake for today;

Breakfast – tomatoes (red) and onions (white flesh tinged with purple).

Lunch – Cabbage (green leafy), lettuce (green leafy), and onions plus tomatoes (red) and pepper (red) from the sauce she buys from the food vendor Supper – Garden eggs (white to creamish) and tomato plus okro (green), all from the soup

From the above, Salma’s aim of having a variety of vegetables of different colours in her meal plan for the day has been achieved.

Meal	Amount eaten	Number of servings
Breakfast	1 cup chopped onions and tomatoes	1
Lunch	1 cup chopped	1
Supper	2 ladleful light soup with boiled okro	2
Tomato gravy and hot pepper sauce with lunch	Enough to satisfy

From above Salma has had more than 4 servings of vegetables in her day. She is quite close to meeting the recommended target of having 5 servings of vegetables daily.

From Salma’s example, we can see that it is possible with intentional planning, to achieve the recommendation of eating a variety of vegetables every day.

Can you also think about the meals you had yesterday. Did you have 5 servings of a variety of vegetables? 

Have you been thinking about improving your diet for a healthier lifestyle? Click here to contact a dietitian.

This article was written by Esime Theresa W. Agordjor (BSc, RD) with contributions from Laurene Boateng (PhD, RD).