Five a day? Try ten.

So eating five portions of fruit and vegetables a day only reduces your risk of cancer by 2.5%. Not worth doing then, clearly, as our no effort, instant gratification society will see this as reason to eat even fewer a day.

In truth the reduction is less than expected because five a day is not even close to what we were atavistically designed to eat in the centuries before the high fat, shrink wrapped, sterile, tasteless convenience garbage that passes for food all too often these days. Ten a day might come closer but even this needs to be seen as a part of a wholesale dietary change rather than the current perception that eating these portions as well as the usual junk will suffice.

But when we are still at a stage where supposedly intelligent newsreaders ask what exactly a portion is then we still have a long way to travel. Our ancestors on the forest floor knew a thing or two.