 Welcome everybody to the Field to Fork. This is our eighth session of the 2021 Field to Fork webinar series. I am Scott Swanson. I'm a media specialist with agriculture communication with the NDSU Extension and I will be the host for today's webinar because usually Julie is the host and Julie is our speaker today. So I will be your host. Our upcoming webinars are featuring Landa Noateke who does food safety outreach in Kansas and Missouri and Amy Ilg from the North Dakota Department of Health. We hope you're joining us for the entire series of 11 webinars but if you do miss one we are being recorded and archived and posted on the Field to Fork site. We're using the Zoom webinar feature this year. You'll be all be in the listening mode today with no cameras or microphones on. People watching this live will be able to ask questions in the chat box. So please go ahead and type your questions in the chat and I will pose those to Julie after the presentation and at the end of her talk today. Next I have a special request for all the viewers of the live talk and any of the archives to maintain our funding sources and offer these types of programs in the future. I ask that you take the very short survey that will land in your email inbox shortly after today's talk. We will have random prize drawings so you may receive a prize in the mail if you win. After submitting your survey you will be redirected to a second survey to enter your name and mailing address. We offer two acknowledgments today first to the USDA Agricultural Marketing Service for the Field to Fork funding. We also have a contribution from Purdue University through a grant from the National Institute of Food and Agriculture. We thank all the entities for their support. So now time for our featured, oh don't forget the non-discrimination policy NDSU does not discriminate in any of their programs or activities. So now it's time to our featured speaker. I already did. I'll give it away. I mentioned Julie. Please introduce Julie Garden Robinson. Julie Garden Robinson is a professor and a food and nutrition specialist for NDSU Extension. She does nutrition, food safety, and health research and outreach with statewide programming for young children through older adults. She has written a weekly column, Prairie Fair, since 1997. And she has worked with dozens of food entrepreneurs in her career. Julie, take it away. Well, thank you Scott and thanks to everyone who's joining us today and all of you who've joined the entire series. We've had really good response and we always want to know other things that you want to know about. So be sure when you take the survey to give us some ideas about other topics. I'm here to talk about some hot topics in nutrition and we're going to take a more experiential approach today. I have a couple of polls I will ask you to fill out real easy. And we'll also use the chat box in some different ways. And certainly you're free to ask any questions and if I don't know the answer, I will figure it out and let you know. So we are going to take a look at fruit and vegetable recommendations, some current research on fruits, vegetables, and diseases, food safety tips, and some ideas about incorporating more fruits and vegetables in your daily diet. And I do want to acknowledge my former intern, Aliana, for helping create the beautiful slide. So thanks to Aliana for that. So I want you to pause for a second and think about yesterday. Let's count on our fingers using our fingers the number of cups of fruits and vegetables from the time you got up till you went to bed. So let's start in the morning for breakfast. Raise a finger if you had some fruit juice or vegetables or any kind of produce item first thing in the morning. Now let's think about snacks mid-morning. Did you have a piece of fruit? Did you have some carrot sticks? Now let's move on to lunch. What did you have? Any fruits or vegetables? Does anyone have any fingers up right now? I hope so. Let's move to a mid-afternoon snack. Did you have some strawberries or something else in the afternoon that was a fruit or a vegetable? Now let's get to our evening meal. Any fruits or vegetables? Lift up your fingers. And finally, evening snacks. Did you have any fruits or vegetables? And again, in our present way of thinking, a serving is equal to a cup. OK, Scott, would you launch the first poll? And our question is, how many one cup servings did you eat yesterday? And you can go ahead and click. All right. So 43 percent were in that three to four cup range. So that's good. Small amount, 6 percent more than five cups and another 6 percent less than one cup. All right. Well, let's go on to the next slide. We're going to be visiting some of the latest fruit and vegetable recommendations. And these are based on some newly released dietary guidelines. Every five years, there are new dietary guidelines released. So we're in our new ones. Actually, they were just released not too many months ago, and they go from 2020 through 2025. And certainly, if you want to take a close look, it's a long guide, but it does tell you all the latest research all the way from little tiny kids, infants through the elderly population. So how much fruit do we need? Well, every person's needs can vary a bit. We're we're not too different as adults, but you will see as I show you some of the tables that depending on if you're male or female, you may find that if you're a male, you will need more fruit. Then us women, so let's take a look at fruits. So find find your age. So I'm looking at me. Any woman from nineteen to sixty plus needs one and a half to two cups of fruits where men nineteen to sixty plus need two to two and a half cups. So not too different. And then if you have young children or grandchildren, take a look at those recommendations as well. And I did list a website at the bottom, MyPlate.gov. That's where you can find a lot more information about this. And even I think you can still print out a daily food guide. So now let's take a look at vegetables. Each person needs one to four cups of vegetables per day, depending on age. If you're out walking around, running, getting more physical activity, you may need more. So I'm here to tell you to eat more. You don't hear that often from a dietitian. Most of us need to eat less of certain foods, but vegetables and fruits are definitely in that eat more category. And again, men typically need more vegetables than women because of weight and size and maybe physical activity in some cases. So here again, these are the daily vegetable recommendations. Find your sex and age for nineteen to sixty year old women, two and a half to three cups. Men, nineteen to sixty plus anywhere from two and a half to four cups. So there is a little variation. And again, children also need plenty of vegetables. And if they're really young, two to four, one to two cups per day, depending on activity. So remember these totals because I'm going to have an activity for you to take home or put on your fridge at the very end. So part of this presentation, I decided to focus on a. A piece I wrote many years ago about what color is your food, because eating a more colorful diet, eating from the whole rainbow of colors of produce can really have some significant health effects. But unfortunately, according to the USDA's food consumption surveys, the average American adult consumes only point nine cups of fruit and one point four cups of vegetables. So those of you who said three to four cups per day are doing better than the average American. But most of us do not eat enough fruits and vegetables. In fact, only one in 10 adults meets the federal fruit and vegetable recommendations. So 10 percent and only 12 percent of adults meet the federal recommendations for fruit and less than 10 percent meet the federal recommendations for vegetables. So that's all from the Centers for Disease Control. And in fact, if you want to look more closely at any of these references, they are live links and we posted or will post this presentation as a handout. And you should have received it also by email. So now I'd like you to go to the chat box. Why don't we eat enough fruits and vegetables in general? What are some thoughts you have on that? Too expensive, cost for quality, not in season. Don't like them. That's honest taste. Not sure how to prepare them. Yeah, some fruits can drive up glucose for those with diabetes. People don't grow up with gardens. Harder to take with you. They don't last long in the fridge. OK, I'm going to give you some strategies around all these possibilities of why we don't eat them. Thanks for all that earlier in the easier the summer than winter. Those are all. Those are all great responses. And this is what the Centers for Disease Control has told us cost, as many of you pointed out, limited availability and access, quick spoilage, not knowing how to prepare and not having enough time. I'm not sure if other people, if anyone listed that, that it takes a little time to peel and that sort of thing. But I think you got all of these and this is from research that's been done nationwide. So let's let's take a close look before we get to strategies. Those will come at the end. But how much is a serving of fruits or vegetables? Well, I kind of gave you this answer earlier. It's a cup, but depending on the fruit or vegetable in the form of it, that can take different different sizes, I guess. So a small apple is a cup, a large banana, a large orange, a watermelon wedge, eight large strawberries, 32 grapes, one large bell pepper. All of these would count as a cup. So maybe some of you will see that you actually are eating more fruits or vegetables than you think. Sometimes the serving sizes aren't as big as you might think. I can certainly eat eight strawberries. In fact, I have some strawberries in my fridge and you just reminded me that if I don't eat those pretty soon, they are not going to be very good anymore. So they certainly can have a shorter shelf life. Well, some reasons for eating fruits and vegetables is that they can reduce our risk for several chronic diseases, including heart disease, type two diabetes, cancer in particular, and they can also help us with weight management. So if you see in yourself that, gee, I really should eat more vegetables or fruits or whatever, there's a good reason to do it. And I will be providing some of the latest research that we found as we were exploring these concepts and creating this presentation. So one of the one of the ways to think about fruits and vegetables is to think in terms of the color groupings. So we have red and green, not as many purple and blue, white and also orange and yellow. So those are the primary color groupings of fruits and vegetables. So now I'm going to ask God if you will launch poll number two. And this poll is asking you to consider your typical fruit and vegetable choices. What's the most common color that you consume? Red, green, purple, blue, orange, yellow. And a banana is white, actually, even though the peel is yellow. It goes by the part that you eat. That's the color of it. OK, there we go. So green, 50 percent of you said that green was the most common color. And that is really good news because when we look nationally at what people are often short of, it's green vegetables and dark orange and dark gold. So if you're eating a lot of green ones, I'm going to give you some really good reasons why to continue having plenty of green vegetables. So let's take a look at the different color groupings kind of arranged by the rainbow. We think about red. They are colored by natural pigments and they can be colored by lycopene, which are a type of carotenoid, so carrot carotenoid. Lycopene are the red pigment or orangey red pigment that we find in tomatoes. And then we have anthocyanins. Anthocyanins are the same red or even blue pigments that we. We will see soon as flowers bloom in the summer. Anthocyanins color those petunias purple or red or pink and all that. So they're the same type of pigment, although, you know, you don't usually eat flowers, some of them are edible, though. But we have red apples, beets are actually colored by another type of pigment. Red cabbage, cherries, cranberries, grape juice, red grapes, red potatoes on down the list to pomegranates, these are all in our red grouping. And I hope that you are consuming them regularly and also whenever possible, eating the red skin on the red apples, because a lot of the nutrients are right below that level of the skin. So that's why we do recommend that you peel fruits and vegetables thinly. If it's the type of if for some reason you don't like to eat the peeling or if it's a choking hazard for a child, for example, but peel them very thinly. And whenever possible, you know, when it makes sense, you try to eat the skin. Because, as I said, the pigment is where the antioxidant really lies. So anthocyanins are plant pigments and they're very powerful antioxidants. And strawberries, raspberries, all those berries that are red and so on. And red grapes are good sources of anthocyanins. So again, very shown to be healthy for us, to be cancer fighters, to help protect ourselves throughout our body. We have lycopenes, so all of you males, I want you to pay really close attention. I'm going to be showing you some research that's come out that show how powerful lycopenes, which are often found in all the fruits and vegetables you see on the screen, particularly tomatoes and also watermelon, can can help reduce the risk of prostate cancer, which tends to increase as men get older. So again, lycopenes, their type of carotenoid, and they're found in tomatoes, watermelon, red peppers, and also the pink grapefruit that you see on your screen. So eat plenty of this unless there's a medical reason, like if you're on a certain drug and you can't have grapefruit, for example, some of the cholesterol lowering drugs make you not have that. But when possible, try to eat more of these fruits and vegetables. Next, let's move into the orange and yellow group. And lots of choices. So you can read on the screen yellow apples, yellow peppers, rutabagas, yellow summer squash, winter squash, pears, carrots, butternut squash, yellow tomatoes. So we have a lot of choices. And again, these are these are colored by carotenoids. And so just take a cue from nature. Think about, well, now our outdoors are going to burst into bloom and we're going to see green grass and dandelions and all those sorts of things. Same type of pigment, but in a different form in edible foods. So green fruits and vegetables are colored by a pigment called chlorophyll. And again, lots of choices. Artichokes, one of my personal favorites, asparagus comes in the season now, avocados have become really, really popular. And when I was growing up, no one was eating guacamole and putting avocado slices and mashed avocado on toast and things like that. But now they've become quite popular. So all of the green items from green cabbage to cucumbers to honeydew melon, limes, spinach, zucchini. All of these are colored by that plant pigment called chlorophyll. And again, many, many potential health benefits that I will cover shortly. We have the fewest options, I guess, when it comes to the purple and blue. There's fewer blue colored fruits and vegetables than anything else. But they certainly have some potent health benefits for us. Again, similar to those raspberries and strawberries, they're they're colored by natural plant pigments called anthocyanins. So we have our blackberries, blueberries, choked cherries, eggplant, figs, Juneberries, plums, prunes, purple grapes, raisins. Enjoy all of these different colors. Again, anthocyanins, powerful antioxidants that can lower our risk for certain diseases like heart disease, cancer, and the other ones I mentioned. Well, white is a color as well. And in fact, white vegetables and fruits are colored naturally by anthocyanins. And some contain natural compounds. We call them phytochemicals or plant chemicals like allicin and several others. So bananas are white, even though they have a yellow peel. I don't know of anyone who eats the peel. Maybe somebody does cauliflower, garlic, ginger, mushrooms, onions, parsnips, potatoes, turnips. So I presented in this way these different colors to hopefully encourage everyone on this call and anyone who listens to the archive to to consume a wider variety of fruits and vegetables. Variety is key for nutrition. We want you to eat a wide variety of foods. So are we eating the rainbow? Unfortunately, not as much as maybe we should be. The next slide is. Letting us know how we're doing collectively as a nation in terms of our overall dietary quality. This slide is based on the Healthy Eating Index, and it comes from the 2015 scores. Periodically, they come up with new health scores. So if your age is two to four, I don't think I have anyone on that young. Or if your age is 60 plus, these two groups are doing the best. The closer to 100 that your score is, the better. So the younger and the 60 plus year olds are doing the best. Those of us in the middle. Look, who has the lowest 14 to 18. Those teenagers have the lowest healthy eating index score. But you can see almost everybody. Needs a little improvement in their diet. If your diet was perfect and I don't have a perfect diet, few people do. That would mean you'd earn 100. So most people don't meet the US dietary guidelines. And unfortunately, and I don't think the pandemic has helped us, but 74 percent of adults and 40 percent of children in the US are overweight or obese. And that number seems to be climbing. It's linked with health concerns, including type two diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and all these other items. So by eating low calorie, nutrient dense foods like fruits and vegetables, you could actually reduce your risk of being overweight. And you could also reduce your risk of several diseases. Now here is some more bad news. Unfortunately, this is according to the Centers for Disease Control. Sixty percent of children did not eat enough fruit. And 93 percent of children did not eat enough vegetables from 2007 to 2010, according to a study that was published. So I'm going to ask you to go on the chat and I'm going to my question for you. And this isn't a poll. Yes or no, did your mom or dad ever in your life when you were growing up, tell you to eat your vegetables? I'm seeing a lot of yeses. If it was your mom, just remember, moms are always right. And it's it's a very good thing to eat your vegetables and fruits. And if you have children or grandchildren, please do your part in encouraging them, because that is not a good figure of 93 percent did not eat enough vegetables. And in North Dakota, in fact, I found some statistics. I believe it was only one percent of kids met the the recommendations. So again, we do have this growing issue of overweight and obesity. And I personally think that if we would focus in on more more vegetables, fruits, more whole grains, lean proteins, you know, adequate milk and so on, we could we could turn the tide in a lot of chronic diseases, simply with changes in our dietary habits and more physical activity. So again, I'm going to review a little bit of the benefits of eating the rainbow. So hearkening back, anthocyanins and strawberries and raspberries are powerful antioxidants and they they protect us. So consider a goal. We have strawberries in season, berries come into play real soon. Eat some more of these. They're really good for you. Taking a closer look at a study. So this is a little research highlight. This came from 2003. And this was a longitudinal, which means it was a long term study. Correlational means that they they related the diseases back to, you know, some factor, in this case, it was their berry intake. So they wanted to know if there was a relationship between berries and heart health, and they had twenty six hundred and forty one participants. So that's a lot of people for a study. And they found that eating more berries was associated with a reduced risk of mortality in their their group, which was middle aged men. So adding some strawberries to your your cereal or making yourself a smoothie, I think smoothies are one of the underestimated foods. That is a great way and you can put vegetables in them. You can put spinach. We have lots of smoothie recipes on our website, but that is a great way to help yourself meet your goals for both fruits and vegetables if you have a difficult time. So studies have shown that one to two servings of these anthocyanin rich foods a week can help protect you against high blood pressure or hypertension, heart disease, diabetes, and also disorders of the pancreas. Your pancreas is really important. That's where a lot of the enzymes are made and stored in your body, including the all important. Insulin. So one to two servings of berries. And again, anthocyanins can be red or they can be blue. So you can you can you can make your choice if you like grapes, purple grapes, better or, you know, blue plums or whatever, you can certainly make your choice and try to have a couple servings a week. So Lycopene, I I made a little mention of this particularly I want men but also women to pay close attention to Lycopene's. Lycopene's and tomatoes can reduce our risk of prostate cancer for males, lung cancer and also stomach cancer. And if you like ketchup or if you like cooked spaghetti sauce or pizza sauce or processed tomato juice, maybe you buy it in a can. Know that you're going to find a higher amount of Lycopene in processed tomato products than fresh. It concentrates the Lycopene's and we're often programmed to think that only we should only eat fresh fruits and vegetables because they're better. And actually with storage, you can see decreases in in the amount of some vitamins and so on because of that breakdown a little bit that happens during storage. So if you like spaghetti sauce, you have it at least once a week. Good for you. You could be lowering your risk of various types of cancer. So here's a research study highlight. And again, if you want to take a close look at it, it's these are live links on your handout. This study was completed and published in 2016. It was again a long term study and they studied relationships, the associations between Lycopene and tomato sauce intake and the risk of prostate cancer, huge study, 46,000 participants. And they found that men who consume two or more servings of Lycopene rich foods were 30 percent less likely to develop prostate cancer. So this is a recent study. And again, it highlights that association between eating more processed tomatoes on you can can them yourself if you like to can foods, we can provide you with all the recommendations, but you might actually be lowering your risk for prostate cancer as a result. And I'll add another from another study. They found that if there was a little fat in with that tomato sauce, so say you like ground beef, which would have a little fat in with your spaghetti sauce that is going to help your body use those Lycopene's. They're they're a fat soluble item. And here's another study, a review of 25 studies. We call this a meta analysis. So you take a whole bunch of studies and you find the commonality. This grouping of studies, when they put it all together, the researchers noted that a high Lycopene intake was linked to a nine percent reduction in prostate cancer development. So again, two servings of food items rich in Lycopene's per week probably can reduce your risk of prostate cancer. But you also have to think about your overall lifestyle. This is not magic. So you do whatever you want and have some tomatoes. No, you have to think about your overall lifestyle. Get plenty of physical activity and so on. But there there is this linkage. So next, let's take a look at one of my favorites, beta carotene. I love sweet potatoes. They're also fine found in pumpkins. And eating more of the beta carotene rich foods reduces our risk of cancer and heart disease. It can also help our immune system. And yes, mom was right if she ever told you that eat your carrots because they're good for your eyes, that is true. But maybe in a different way, carrots are actually linked to lowering our risk for night blindness. And if you want to lower your risk for macular degeneration, I have some green vegetables I'd like to sell you like spinach, because that that particular vegetable is particularly good in helping reduce our risk for macular degeneration. As can as can these carotenoid rich vegetables. OK, let's go on to another research highlight. So this was done in 2010 and it was a cohort study. And by that, I added the definition cohorts means that the people in the study share something in common that can be their occupation, their age, their sex, you know, something like that. So they wanted to research the effects of beta carotene on age related macular degeneration. They had fifty five hundred and forty seven people in their study. And they did find that a diet rich in beta carotene reduced their risk of developing macular degeneration. So beta carotene works and so do the pigments that are found in in green leafy vegetables in other studies. All right, how about these orange and yellow items like oranges and grapefruit? Why are they good for us? They work with vitamin C. They can reduce our risk for heart disease and cancer. And they can also help our eyes. They can reduce or prevent the occurrence of ocular diseases that result in blindness. So think about fruits and vegetables, often as a pharmacy in your kitchen that you don't need a prescription for. You can you can actually have some true health benefits as a result of what you eat in this study. And I have a few more I'm going to share with you. It came from nineteen ninety nine. Again, it was a long term study and they looked at relationships correlational and they wanted to see the link between bioflavonoids and heart disease, huge study over thirty four thousand people. And they found that by eating more flavonoids, the people could reduce their risk of death from heart disease in postmenopausal women. So again, they're good for all of us. And there are certain things that we do want to try to do. And that's eat a variety of fruits and vegetables. How about this green group? A lot of you noted that you are good green vegetable eaters and that's excellent. I will note that if some of you are on certain blood clotting type medications, you probably need to watch your intake of leafy green. So work with your dietitian, your doctor, so that you don't overdo it, because some of these foods can interact with medications. So check in with what it says on that on that small print if you're on any kind of medications, so lutein. So here's the part about leafy greens I alluded to earlier. Eating more leafy greens, including spinach, can reduce our risk for cataracts, which affect a lot of people and macular degeneration. And both of these conditions can lead to blindness. So carrots are good for your eyes. All those high beta carotene type items, lutein is especially good for our eyes. And you may see some supplements on the market that say that, you know, they're really super high in all these types of pigments and so on. But I always say food first. There are so many complex chemicals found in fruits and vegetables that no one has ever isolated and put into a pill. So the best thing is to grow them in your garden. I know a lot of your gardeners can them for yourself for use, buy them in the store in different forms, frozen, fresh, canned, dried. They all count. They all count toward that total. For me, it's about four and a half cups of vegetables and fruits I need a day. So I know that they all count, even if maybe some of these fruits and vegetables are expensive for us, depending on where we live. So here's a little study about lutein, which is found in broccoli and leafy greens and so on, and they did the study in two separate segments, 94 to 98 in 2001 to 2004. Long term studies, eighteen hundred and two women and the women were fifty to seventy nine. And they looked at the link between eating luteins and the development of cataracts. And they found that the women who had the most lutein, maybe they love broccoli like I do, were thirty two percent less likely to develop cataracts than those who consumed in the lowest percentile, the lowest amount. So again, eating more of these luteins may definitely help us. Lutein, by the way, is also found in eggs. So if you hate broccoli, you hate spinach and any of the leafy greens, lutein is also found in other in other foods. As I as I mentioned, fruits and vegetables are kind of complex. They have lots of phytochemicals. So in broccoli, we also have compounds called indoles. And along with broccoli and the cruciferous vegetables like cauliflower and cabbage. These indoles can help protect us against breast cancer. And that's a really important thing to remember. So what you eat can serve almost as a pharmacy for you. So eat more fruits and vegetables. In 2005, there was a study done and they used a food frequency questionnaire and a risk factor questionnaire. And they looked at the correlation between these indoles that I just mentioned and breast cancer and they had 1500 people in the study and they found an inverse relationship between indole consumption and breast cancer risk. So there are many things that you can do to lower your risk for cancer. Now we're on to our purple. Here's a fun fact, eating more blueberries is linked with improved memory function and also healthy aging. They are excellent antioxidants and they protect ourselves. All the cells in our body, they help protect them from damage, which, you know, damaged cells is what is happening if you have cancer and heart disease. So by eating more of these blue fruits and vegetables, you could actually lower your risk for cancer and heart disease and another study we didn't put in. But there have been a lot of studies with animals like mice and rats. And they give the mice or rats some blueberry extract. And they have found that the mice can find their way around the maze a little better if they have this extract. So we're not mice or rats, but there certainly have been some studies they've looked into where, gosh, these antioxidants can also help our brain and help us age healthfully. So this is a giant study on ninety three thousand six hundred participants, eighteen years long, and they surveyed the people every four years. And they wanted to know if there was an association between blueberries and heart health, and they found that those who had the highest intake of anthocyanins from blueberries decreased their risk of heart conditions, including high blood pressure and also heart attacks. So I think I need some more blueberries, plus they're coming into season. White, as I said, are also that's also a color. And within our white group, for example, garlic and onions, I hope you love them, I do. The compound, Allison, may help maintain our healthy cholesterol levels and also healthy blood pressure levels. And it can reduce the risk of stomach cancer and heart disease. So there are things that we can all do in our lifestyle. We cannot change our genetics. That's what we are in terms of the the diseases that maybe our ancestors had, but we can certainly do something with our lifestyle that could lower our risk for lots of diseases. So in twenty eighteen, there was a random study double blind, means the researchers didn't know who was involved and neither did the participants. So it was randomized and they looked at the effects of Allison on cancer growth. A smaller study, 34 people, and they found that this compound within garlic actually inhibited cancer cell growth and caused fragmentation of the DNA. So it it kind of annihilated some of those cancer cells. So if you like garlic and onions, good for you, really good for you in several ways from keeping a healthy cholesterol level to maybe helping us prevent cancer of at least some types. So now let's go on into how do you preserve nutrients? Just review, limit your skin peeling, try to eat that colorful part whenever it's possible for you. When you're cooking vegetables, use a small amount of water, because the more you boil them and the more water you use, the more you could lose some of our fragile nutrients like vitamin C, for example, and some of our B vitamins are more fragile than vitamin A, for example. Watch out for boiling things. Heat breaks down chemicals at high temperatures. So, you know, don't do the prolonged cooking whenever possible or boiling. I mean, you could certainly put things in your pressure cooker. That's pretty quick. But you certainly will always have some nutrients, no matter how you cook it. You're not going to get rid of all the nutrients by cooking the food and then serve the food quickly, because the longer the food sits and is held, you may lose some nutrients as well. Well, I do a lot of work in the area of safety. And I just have a few tips for you. Keep fresh produce fresh. And as some of you mentioned, spoilage is one of the main reasons people don't purchase fresh fruits and vegetables. So examine the freshness before purchasing. If you see a lot of bruises, if you see mold, probably won't see that very often in grocery stores, but you want to choose freshest food and not damaged and dented and things like that. If you see any signs of spoilage, I guess I wouldn't pick that up. If the produce, on the other hand, is just kind of not perfect, not perfectly shaped, that doesn't affect the nutrition. So but if it's damaged, it might have some spoilage starting to happen. When you're putting your fruits and vegetables in your cart, put it away from meat, because you don't want to cross contaminate. And we all know the drill on hand washing after a year of a pandemic. Twenty seconds. And then the other piece to remember, and unfortunately, some of this was misinformation that got spread during the pandemic, we don't want to use soap and we certainly don't want to use bleach on our fresh fruits and vegetables. All we need is plenty of running water. And you can certainly use a brush if necessary, but no soap. So five ways to keep your produce safe. Remove the outer leaves of cabbage and lettuce, use separate cutting boards, clean and sanitize your cutting boards. You can use hot water. You can soak it in a real light bleach solution that you're cutting boards, bought a tablespoon of bleach per gallon of water per minute. That'll sanitize pretty well. Serve cut up produce in containers over ice and then store your fresh produce below 40 degrees. So that will help you if any of you are planning parties for the spring. Remember that you need to keep cut produce cold. If it's a hot day outside and you're going to have a barbecue, you get one hour of fresh cut produce out at warm temperatures like above 80, 90 degrees, so keep food cold. So the last couple of slides I have for you are ways to increase vegetables. If you found that you need some more, check the freezer aisle. Frozen vegetables are quick, easy to use, and they are actually just as nutritious as fresh vegetables, with one exception. If you walk out to your garden and you pick your green beans and you go right in the house and you prepare them, those are probably your most nutritious. But most of the time when we buy them at a store, it's taken a while for them to get there, so these frozen vegetables are packed at peak freshness. Keep on hand some canned goods. If you are choosing canned goods, we do recommend reduced sodium or no salt added. Or another thing you can do is simply rinse those those fresh beans, whether that's garbanzo beans or even green beans. They do process them with a little salt. Most of us don't need that much salt. Try some different preparation techniques. We have a lot of resources in this area. Try grilled vegetables, grilled fruits. We have publications on exactly how to do that on our website. And if you find that you have a hard time meeting these recommendations, you can prepare things ahead of time, make yourself some little baggies, you know, they'll be fine in your fridge a couple of days, even if you get them all washed and cut. And then take them with you to work or grab a bag when you're going in. You know, you're going to have a snack. Just make it easy for yourself. In terms of fruits, if you found that I don't eat enough fruit. Keep a visible reminder, like a bowl of whole fruit on your table. I had an apple on my desk and it was sitting here. I had washed it and I ate it this morning because it was right there. And it wasn't down the hall in the refrigerator. Try a different varieties of fruits, dried, frozen, canned, different colors. We certainly talked about that this afternoon. And then if possible, you know, affordability and all that taken into account. For fiber purposes, try to have more whole or cut up fruit instead of juice. Juice counts 100 percent fruit or vegetable juice counts. But often you don't have the fiber and all the benefits of dietary fiber. So we have a lot of resources for you. If you just, you know, if you forget what our website is and most people don't type it in, just Google NDSU extension and food. And you'll find a huge amount of resources. And we also have food preservation archive webinars. I did those earlier in the pandemic and we had some earlier this year. As well. So check out all these resources. They're all free and they're always available. So my closing message before we have one more thing that I want you to do before we close out for the day and I take your questions. Remember, try to add more color to your plate. All these different vegetable and fruit colors carry some very powerful health benefits. So here's your last task. I want you all to think about yourself, set a goal for yourself. If you're doing great, just, you know, stay on course, keep eating, you know, five cups of fruits and vegetables a day, but I want you to write it down. And I want to I want you to put it somewhere where you're going to see it, maybe on your refrigerator or your mirror or someplace where it's going to remind you. I hope that you've that you've become inspired if you weren't already to eat more fruits and vegetables and also to enjoy the upcoming spring season and gardening and use some of the resources that we have for you. We have a couple of newsletters, one's called Nourish, they come out at the beginning of each month on others family table and a third is more of a community health type newsletter is called Faith Communities Alive because it was developed when we were doing work with local faith communities, but it has a lot of resources. So again, it's on our front page of our website and I'm going to leave up my my direct email and that's my office phone number. And you can certainly ask me any questions. So Scott, do I have any questions? Oh, yeah, there's definitely a few here to go. OK, great. I'm going to scroll back up here and read the first one that was about, you know, from earlier in the presentation, Tamara was asking that she's heard that Lycopene's are higher in processed foods. Is that true and why? Because it seems that most nutrients are less when processed. Lycopene's are one of the exceptions where they are they're concentrated during the processing. So when they make the jars of salsa and tomato sauce and all those things, that heat process actually concentrates the Lycopene. So that's why, yes, indeed, they are higher in processed foods. And again, just harkening back to have a little bit of fat. It's OK to have fat in your diet, because if the recipe with the Lycopene has some fat in it, that's going to be used by your body better. All right. Catherine was asking that COVID restrictions have made it have made shopping more difficult. So are canned and frozen vegetables and fruits equally beneficial? I'd say that frozen usually I just wrote a column about this today. Let's see if I remember what I wrote. Frozen are are packed so they're blanched and frozen within hours of harvest at most of these large vegetable companies. So they are probably a little bit higher in nutrition than canned, but canned have the advantage of lasting a long time on our shelf. Canned, frozen, fresh, dried are all they all count toward the totals that we talked about, but if I were to to pick one, if I couldn't have fresh and I didn't know how long it had been and route to the grocery store, I'd probably go with frozen, but canned counts. Catherine, another one right after talking about home canning and she she said that all home canned vegetables are supposed to be boiled for 10 minutes prior to eating. So are we wasting our time by home canning because the nutrients are removed? You actually do not have to boil down that. That was that was an old that's what our grandmas and maybe our moms were taught because way back in the day, we didn't have great recommendations for canning. And now you follow the the rules that we have and what comes from the National Center for Home Food Preservation, you can use your canned goods out of the jar. If you're worried about them, boiling for 10 minutes will certainly inactivate any issues you'd have, not all issues, but we don't have that general rule anymore. So you can, for example, if you made salsa and salsa is a mixture of tomatoes and onions and various low acid foods, you do not have to boil that salsa before you serve it, you can just take your salsa. If you can't, it right. You acidified it, you followed all the rules, pour it in a bowl and eat it. All right, jumping over to the Q&A, we have two from Liz. First one, is there any benefit to using a produce wash type to product? You know, like those bottles, you special, I suppose, special bottling stuff that says produce, produce wash. If I recall right, all all of those produce washes do is add extra cost to it's often considered up to a quarter per serving. We we don't have general recommendations to to use the special produce washes. Just plenty of running water, safe water, of course, and a brush if necessary. That is what comes from the national level. So not a huge, you know, not a general recommendation to use the produce washes. They will take off some of the wax, perhaps, you know, if you're worried about eating wax, but it's edible wax, it won't hurt you. That's like fiber. So I'm not a proponent of those special produce washes. All right, one more from Liz here. Are fruits imported from other countries regulated for pesticide use? According to the same guidelines as in the US, she's wondering, kind of, for example, grapes from Chile. Hmm, I I do not believe that they they test them when they arrive in the country, but there would be specifications on what was allowable in order to import them into the country. So they there'd be no way that they could they could run the analytical work on all of the fresh produce that comes in the country. But they do have specifications. Once in a while, we have run into issues with with bacteria, for example, on fresh produce that's been imported or also grown in our country. So what do we do? I I guess I don't worry too much about fruits that are imported. Just eat more fruits, eat more vegetables. All right, we're going to stick with the washing fruits and vegetables questions, because Sue is asking soaking fruits and vegetables in fresh water for five minutes. Is that as good as rinsing them under fresh water? Hmm. The general directions that I'm always seeing is under put them under water. If you were wanting maybe to get some of the if there are bugs, for example, you wanted to soak out, maybe I'd let them soak for a while. But if I did soak them in water, for that reason, I'd probably put them in a strainer and I'd still rinse them. So it's it's the rule of thumb is rinsing under running water. OK, and Nicole is wondering, is lemon juice OK for washing produce like grapes? They're always so dirty. Yeah, certainly lemon juice. There's some studies going on right now. I have a colleague in another state who's doing testing on lemon juice and vinegar and some of those items that you probably have in your cupboard. They certainly won't hurt if you want to add some lemon juice. On campus several years ago, one of our doctoral students did a project where she added vinegar, and I guess one thing that can happen with vinegar is that your fresh produce could end up tasting like pickles. So lemon juice, fine. No soap. OK, another one from Sue. The best way to get the benefits of store bought carrots would be what? Scrubbing them or peeling? That is a really good question. I don't know if anyone has ever studied that. I would probably personally, I just had carrots last weekend. I peel them because it's really hard to get all the soil off. But again, the closer you can peel, you know, the thinner the peel, the better. Yeah, I mean, many, many of us probably grew up going out to the garden. If our family set a garden and probably pulled one out of the soil and ate it. I wouldn't do that now, but I did back then. OK, well, Sue's going to try to stump you here again, maybe. So she says that they eat kale, zucchini, winter squash and tomatoes that have been stored in the garage, unheated, but insulated, way into January and February. And so she imagines that they lose a great deal of the vitamins, but not the fiber. Is there any study that gives comparisons on what nutrients and micro minerals we are still getting from them? Um, follow up with me. I can probably find you a resource. I know that the US Department of Agriculture has done those sorts of storage studies. And you're not going to lose all your vitamins. You're not going to lose your minerals. Those aren't going to go away. The vitamins that might go away would be your vitamin C and your any B vitamins, which aren't common in vegetables anyway. But your fat soluble vitamins will still be there. Your fiber will be there. Carbohydrates, proteins, those are not going to change with storage. All right, another storage one. Kind of two questions in the same one here from Tamara. When storing fruits and vegetables, can they be stored in plastic containers? And then the second part is that they also temporarily stored extra canned foods in the tin containers for a day or two. But now she's hearing that chemical leech into food from plastic or tin. I don't know if that was a question actually. OK, let's see. Say the first one again. I was just when when storing fruits and vegetables, can they be stored in plastic containers? Oh, sure. No problem. Any food grade material. If you have glass, glass is always going to be your best storage you want. But plastic is OK. And as far as canned goods, like leaving your pineapple in your can and put it in your fridge or whatever you happen to have, mandarin oranges, that is not going to hurt you that we might have learned that many years ago, where if you put your cans in the fridge and suddenly you were going to get very sick because of the leaching, that isn't a concern. There there are linings that are put in the cans. So you're you're not going to get sick because of that. But I'd rather see you take that leftover canned whatever happens to be in the can and put it in glass would be best or a plastic container. And remember, the general rule of thumb for any kind of leftover is about four days is good. You know, so four day throw away is often the rule of thumb with perishable foods. Yeah, rereading that. Now I see that leaching part was more of a comment because the second she did an extra question at the end, she goes, she's tired of purchasing melons that taste like potatoes. Any comments to help? Ha, I never had that happen. I guess buy them when possible at peak ripeness. They should yield a little bit if you're buying a melon when you push on the the end. I keep melons in the refrigerator. We are working on a little storage guide that will be coming out. So keep keep that in mind. And we're also working on a publication related to what I was talking about today. And we have another pocket guide that's available. So we do have a lot of resources that I think will help you if you want to learn more about these topics. Well, as all of them in the Q&A in the chat, there was one who was just asking for references from the 25 studies combined slide. I don't know if you will have you will have access to that if you download the handout and you can just click on the little link. So that'll take you right to the actual publication. And if you can't find it, just drop me an email and I can download it for you. All right, perfect. Thanks, Julie, that was all of them in the Q&A and in the chat. All right, I'm tired now. A lot of talking. Well, thanks, everyone, for joining us today. And we have two more sessions left. And I hope you join us for those next two sessions as well.