Are fruits and vegetables any more nutritious than air?

There's evidence that eating more fruits and vegetables is good for you (see, e.g., [1]), but buried in [2] under point 8 of "Needs for Future Research" is the admission that

The mechanism(s) of action for the effects of vegetables and fruits have not been determined and, therefore, may vary for different health outcomes. The observed effects could be a simple displacement of these foods with other foods that cause poorer outcomes…

In other words, the command to eat more plants, constantly reverberating through the echo chamber of conventional wisdom on nutrition as it's parroted by everyone from the USDA itself all the way down to Michael Pollan, could with equal justification be replaced with the command to just eat less.

Or we could try to give laymen an accurate impression of the state of nutritional science, to admit what we don't know as readily as we boast of what we do know, but persuading people to do what we think is in their best interests is clearly more important than helping them understand the world.

[1] http://www.nutritionevidencelibrary.com/topic.cfm?cat=3238
[2] http://www.nutritionevidencelibrary.com/topic.cfm?cat=2854

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What atrocities have been committed in the name of backwards compatibility!

Well, there's a key difference between vegetables and air: satiety. Air will never make you fell full. So perhaps the key is to eat less, but eat things that have a high Satiety Index (like potatoes).
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"To truly live, one must first be born." ~ Evan [aX]
Paper Mario Social: The Safe Haven of GameFAQs. (Board 2000083)

Yes, with caveats like: it probably isn't in the public interest to encourage the poor to buy any more food than they need to (particularly fresh produce, which is expensive), and Brian Wansink's experiments (like his infamous bottomless-bowl-of-soup study[1] and huge-bucket-of-stale-popcorn study[2]) suggest that satiety is determined less by gastric sensations than by unconscious reasoning processes based on visual cues.

[1] Wansink, B., Painter, J. E., & North, J. (2005). Bottomless bowls: Why visual cues of portion size may influence intake. Obesity Research, 13, 93–100. doi:10.1038/oby.2005.12

[2] Wansink, B., & Kim, J. (2005). Bad popcorn in big buckets: Portion size can influence intake as much as taste. Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior, 37, 242–245. doi:10.1016/S1499-4046(06)60278-9

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What atrocities have been committed in the name of backwards compatibility!

What about the benefits of fiber? Like not getting bowel cancer, and more pleasantly pooping.
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Willis, it seems like every other time you post, I need to look up a word that's in the OED or Urban Dictionary but not both.
-Mimir

Fiber's cool, but grains can provide it, too.

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What atrocities have been committed in the name of backwards compatibility!

Well, fine then. Let's all just eat a bunch of whole grains then! Wouldn't everyone love that? You know whole grains can't solve everything (ignoring for a moment my rice cooker full of brown rice, lentils and barley).

Anyway, I think the argument that it is in society's interests to encourage the poor to get the most caloric bang for their literal buck is ridiculous. Obesity rates aren't because calories-as-such are expensive. Beer at any gas station in America is without exaggeration cheaper than water, and soda is cheaper than beer. While we're on the subject, where there is famine in the modern world, it isn't because calories themselves are expensive. We've all seen that ad about the boat load of rice that they're ready to take to Kenya if only they can raise enough money to hire the ship and bribe the local officials.

Anyway, if we're assuming that starting portion size is more important than gastric cues, fruits and vegetables are awesome. The portion size of an apple is an apple, after all. They're already pretty well proportioned (and of course delicious).
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Willis, it seems like every other time you post, I need to look up a word that's in the OED or Urban Dictionary but not both.
-Mimir

[This message was deleted at the request of the original poster]

I'm not saying that the USDA should advise people to get the most food energy for their dollar, so much as it shouldn't be promoting fruits and vegetables as, well, health-promoting—as containing essential nutrients. It seems more appropriate to pitch them as safer alternatives to Big Macs. Governmental food advisories tend to be of the form "Eat more of this" when they ought to be "Eat less of that". After all, you can put broccoli on your pizza, but that defeats the purpose.

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What atrocities have been committed in the name of backwards compatibility!

I'm not sure I get it. Aren't there proven benefits to fruit? As in, if all you eat is ramen you'll develop scurvy, so eat an orange. An orange in this instance isn't displacement of ramen, right? It's benefiting you by giving you some vitamin C and avoiding scurvy, yes?
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Yeah, I'm not disputing that certain micronutrient deficiencies can be dangerous. But obviously, scurvy isn't a public health issue in the United States. http://choosemyplate.gov doesn't say "Make half your plate fruits and vegetables" because the USDA is afraid you'll get scurvy if you don't.

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What atrocities have been committed in the name of backwards compatibility!

I think they recognize that people aren't just going to eat less, so yeah they displace it.

I take a multivitamin and avoid excessive carbohydrate intake and I do great.

Yeeeeeah but I'm sort of swayed by Kodi's argument now that the actual thing he's arguing against have some up. The people who aren't going to eat less probably also aren't going to be that into replacing other food with vegetables.
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Willis, it seems like every other time you post, I need to look up a word that's in the OED or Urban Dictionary but not both.
-Mimir

Which can the government more easily get people to do by asking them to do it: replace hamburgers with carrots, or just eat fewer hamburgers? This sounds like a job for psychology!

(At this point I would go rustle up relevant citations, except I'm feeling lazy right now.)

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What atrocities have been committed in the name of backwards compatibility!

Yeeeeeah but I'm sort of swayed by Kodi's argument now that the actual thing he's arguing against have some up.

Didn't understand this sentence, particularly the second part.

I had tremendous trouble typing this morning.
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Willis, it seems like every other time you post, I need to look up a word that's in the OED or Urban Dictionary but not both.
-Mimir