#fruits-and-vegetables

#fruits-and-vegetables

Fill about half your plate with combinations of bananas, strawberries, blueberries, sweet potatoes, peas, carrots and more of your favorites. To boost variety with each meal, look for fruit and veggie blends or step out of your usual routine and try something new.

By following more than 100,000 people in the U.K. for years, researchers found that people whose food choices scored high in any one of five diet categories tended to live longer than people who scored the lowest. Specifically, the team found that even after adjusting for confounding factorssuch as whether people smoked, how much exercise they took and what their education and ethnicity wasstudy participants who tended to eat according to any one of the five diets were 18 to 24 percent less likely to die of any cause. For women, that roughly translated into an extra 1.5 to 2.3 years of life. And for men, it added about 1.9 to three years.

"There's a certain romance to the farmstand - it speaks to the pastoral lifestyle everyone's craving these days," says Rachel Hardage Barrett, Country Living magazine's editor-in-chief.