Fruit and vegetable consumption and non-communicable disease: time to update the ‘5 a day’ message?

Studies reporting ‘new’ associations of food ingredients with diseases are common, and sensational headlines appear almost daily in the news media. Thus, in a recent provocative paper, Schoenfeld and Ioannidis, randomly selected 50 common ingredients from a cookbook, and reported that 40 were apparently associated with increased cancer risk in peer reviewed studies. Unsurprisingly, most of these associations disappeared in subsequent meta-analyses…