The 800

So I have recently discovered that I have a liking for blackberries. They are pretty impressive little fuckers. 1 cup (144 g) of them only gives you 62 calories, but 8 grams of dietary fiber (which is almost a third of the daily recommendation). And I like the way they taste. So I've been putting them on my cereal in the morning, and occasionally just using them as a little snack.

And on my last trip to Trader Joe's when I picked up my weekly package of blackberries, I picked up some strawberries as well. And just found out that they are pretty damned impressive, too: 1 cup of them only puts 47 calories into your guts, but yields 2.9 grams of dietary fiber . . . and 141% of the daily recommendation for vitamin C.

She-it, man.

So I started looking about to see just how much of this stuff am I supposed to be eating per day, and I found the "5" rule thing, which seemed pretty reasonable. But then I found another set of articles which suggested a "10" rule. Which says that you should eat 10 servings of fruits and vegetables a day. Which apparently = 800 grams. Or 28 ounces if you're an American.

Hmmm. That kind of sounds like a lot, I suppose. But I wonder. I eat several fruits and vegetables during the morning and afternoon. And most evenings I eat a go-normous salad with lettuce, tomatoes, artichoke heart, and sometimes some other stuff. So . . . maybe?

Ahmo give it a try. I'm going to keep track of how many grams of fruits and vegetables I consume in a day. Might as well be today, right? So here we go:

MORNING

20 blackberries =  92 grams

10 strawberries   = 154 grams

                              246 grams

EVENING

tomato = 141 grams

artichoke = 46 grams

lettuce = 63 grams 

               250 grams

And then there was the lentil soup. Hmm. Ingredients are listed as Water, Lentils, Celery, Tomato Paste, Modified Food Starch, Spinach. Contains less than 1% of: Salt, Soybean Oil, Sugar, Natural Flavor. So that's quite a bit of vegetable matter in there. But I have no idea how to calculate how many grams of actual vegetable stuff is in there. Let's see. The total (net, that is) weight of the soup is 19 ounces. Which is 538.641 grams. So let's lowball it and say that half of the weight is vegetable matter. That'd be 269 grams. Fair enough? I think so. (Though I'm betting it's low.) So:

lentils - 269 grams

765 grams so far

Night

banana 94 grams

= 859 grams

Well, that's was easy.