A man in one of my lectures once told me that his father had a simple rule for ensuring good health – eat colours. This was before the explosion of artificial colours into our food and decades before nutritionists latched onto ‘eating colours’ as a great health promotion message. The old advice is often the best!

To eat colours means you have to eat a spectrum of different foods including plenty of fruit and vegetables. Despite many health messages changing over the years, the call to eat more fruit and vegetables has never changed. The old saying, “An apple a day keeps the doctor away” is just as true today as it ever was. We now know that apples are high in a flavonoid called quercetin which acts as an anti-oxidant, reducing DNA damage and stopping cancer activating enzymes in the body.

But we can’t live on apples alone, and we also can’t pull out one substance, put it in a pill and think that will keep us healthy. It’s the combination of many different foods that gives us all the vitamins, minerals, fibre and protective phyto (plant)-chemicals. And when those foods are mostly from plants, as the World Cancer Research Fund recommends, you will have a plate full of colour!

Stop reading right now. Take a look outside. How many colours of nature can you see? What colour is the sky? Look closely at a flower. Notice how intense and intricate the colour and design are. In our hectic rush of living it’s easy to overlook the wonders of nature. But what if our world had no colour? What a drab place to live. Now think of what you eat. Do you eat a drab diet or is it as exciting and colourful as nature intended it to be? Colours in nature have many functions and one of these is to make food appealing and interesting for us to eat. So drop that beige bun with the fake pink icing and munch on some natural colours instead!