Do Young People Eat Enough Fruit And Vegetables?

Not even close — they’re barely hitting half their fruit and veg.

Kids are swimming in processed rubbish, and it’s no surprise their fruit and veg intake has fallen off a cliff.

Processed food dominates because it’s everywhere, it’s cheaper than real food, it’s marketed straight at kids, it’s the quickest thing for busy parents to grab, and it’s engineered to be addictive.

Kids are being blasted with junk‑food adverts from the moment they wake up, and it’s shaping what they crave long before they ever see a piece of broccoli.

When I was at school, back then we got a hot dinner, a proper pudding, and a drink — today’s kids get adverts for crisps.

We sat down to real food — proper meat and veg, a warm pudding, a sensible drink, and it all felt normal because everyone ate the same wholesome meal.

Today’s kids get grab‑and‑go junk, neon drinks, and whatever’s quickest, not whatever’s good.

Scurvy is creeping back, and it’s because some people (including kids) aren’t getting enough fresh fruit and veg.

Not Victorian‑era levels, but doctors in the UK are seeing more cases than they used to, especially in people with very poor diets.

Most kids today won’t touch vegetables, and it’s not because they’re naturally fussy. It’s because the whole food environment trains them to prefer junk.

Kids grow up on loud, addictive junk, constant adverts, quick convenience, tight budgets, and taste training that makes broccoli feel like punishment — no wonder veg loses every time.

Junk food is a cocktail of cheap fats, sugars, chemicals, and flavour tricks designed to keep kids hooked.

Junk food is built from cheap fats, hidden sugars, chemical salts, artificial flavours, bright dyes, long‑life preservatives, and stabilisers that make fake food behave like real food.

Junk food isn’t toxic, but the ingredients are dangerous when they replace real food.

A diet of cheap fats, sugar, salt, chemicals, fillers and barely any fruit or veg sets kids up for lifelong health problems.

How can children thrive when their diet is built on the cheapest, loudest, least nutritious stuff?

A lot of people react with shock when they realise how many additives, stabilisers, dyes, and preservatives go into everyday snacks. They say it feels more like manufacturing than cooking.

The cost‑of‑living crisis has pushed parents into buying whatever fills the stomach, not whatever feeds the body.  

We should stop feeding kids cheap processed rubbish and bring back proper, nutritious school meals cooked in real kitchens — not delivered like takeaway.

Proper school meals used to feed kids — today’s processed substitutes just fill them.

And when we see on TV, taste the difference, there really is a difference.

Nobody cooks anymore — it’s freezer food into the air fryer and dinner’s done.

Convenience, exhaustion, cost, lost skills, and constant advertising have replaced cooking with reheating.

Cooking from scratch isn’t just the cooking — it’s planning, shopping, prepping, cleaning. Many families simply don’t have the hours.

Most people don’t cook from scratch anymore because nobody ever taught them, and life never gave them the time.

Butcher’s meat used to be cheap — now you need a mortgage just to buy something fresh.

Meat was cheap because it stayed local — now every step costs money, and families feel it.

People aren’t imagining it — farming is under pressure, and many feel pushed out by rising costs, changing regulations, and industrial competition. That’s very different from “doing away with farmers,” but it does feel like the traditional farmer is being squeezed.

Keep going the way we’re going, and dinner won’t come from a farm — it’ll come from a machine.