Why do the WHO guidelines recommend 400g a day of fruit & veg (excluding starchy veg) but places like Australia recommend 5 serves of veg (375g) plus 2 serves of fruit (300g).
The Australian guidelines are close to double that of the WHO, no?
It looks like in the Australian guidelines legumes and starchy veg fall in the veg category. It encompasses more types of food than the WHO categorization, so of course the recommended amount is going to be higher.
Usually it’s just cause they’ve gone a different route to making the decision. It’s very, very common that governing bodies give different recommendations on nearly every nutrient. Example; DRV’s for vitamin C.. Institute of Medicine set RDA’s at 90mg for men & 75mg for women, they reached this by selecting the value of 80% of maximal neutrophil ascorbate concentration which equates to a vit c intake of ~75mg/day so set this as the AR, then calculated RDA with that. European Food Safety Authority decided that they would calculate AR from the intake that balances metabolic losses and maintains fasting plasma ascorbate conc. at ~50 micromoles/L. This gives a mean intake of 91mg/day (rounded to 90) as the AR, of which they then calculated out the RDA to be 110mg/day for men & 95mg/day for women. Then other bodies will actually give men and women the same RDA to account for the increased iron requirements of women..There’s unfortunately no international standard as each method is debatable.. very confusing for us.