Surprise! 90 percent of Americans don't eat enough fruits or vegetables.

(Image credit: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images)

published 17 November 2017

A study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that an overwhelming percentage of Americans do not consume enough fruits or vegetables, The Guardian reported Friday. The numbers are staggering: Only 1 in 10 Americans actually consumes the recommended amount of the good stuff, the CDC found.

Sarah Reinhardt, a nutritionist and food systems analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), told The Guardian that low fruit and vegetable consumption in the U.S. isn't a huge surprise. "The food industry is not exactly working with public health on this, there's a multimillion-dollar industry working to get people to eat [processed foods]," she said.

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The CDC study is a sobering reminder that as food prices and the cost of living increase, it becomes harder to eat healthy. The Guardian noted that the challenge of increasing fruit and vegetable consumption is not only financial — a 2013 UCS study, for example, found that only 2 percent of the farmland in the United States grew fruit and vegetable products while 59 percent was devoted to growing commodity crops.

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Kelly O'Meara Morales is a staff writer at The Week. He graduated from Sarah Lawrence College and studied Middle Eastern history and nonfiction writing amongst other esoteric subjects. When not compulsively checking Twitter, he writes and records music, subsists on tacos, and watches basketball.

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