Fruit and vegetable consumption revisited.

The consumption of fruit and vegetables is still not approaching satisfactory levels in most studied populations. Despite endless efforts to promote intake among children, adolescents and adults, intake of these products still falls short of recommendations. What are we doing wrong?

This issue of Public Health Nutrition focuses on fruit and vegetable consumption. We have gathered a number of papers dealing with policy aspects, access to farmers’ markets, parenting styles and interventions in different settings, as well as changes in consumption over time in rapidly changing societies(1–10).

Being able to identify so many papers on this particular topic among our submissions tells us that there are many initiatives focusing on this food group. It also tells us that there is a lot of interest in identifying eating patterns, in
improving eating patterns in relation to fruit and vegetable consumption all over the world, and in relating these patterns to sociodemographic characteristics as well as to parenting styles. We certainly have good reasons to turn our attention to this area of public health nutrition research, and we look forward to following developments in this regard.