The percentage of U.S. adults who consumed little to no fruit grew over the 2005–March 2020 period

A growing share of U.S. adults consume less than a quarter of the amount of fruit recommended in Federal dietary guidelines, USDA, Economic Research Service (ERS) researchers have found. Using dietary intake survey data from January 2005 to March 2020, researchers found about 40 percent of all adults consumed below 25 percent of the recommended amount of fruit by the beginning of the 2020s, up from 37 percent in 2013–16 and 32 percent in 2009–12. At the same time, the share of all adults who did consume enough fruit to satisfy Federal recommendations stayed consistently at about 15 percent. The Dietary Guidelines for Americans, 2020–25 defines fruits to include fresh, canned, frozen, and dried products as well as 100-percent fruit juice. Consuming a cup equivalent of all types counts equally toward intake recommendations. Estimates derived from a statistical model found little association between household income or fruit prices and the likelihood that someone met the recommendations or consumed less than 25 percent of them. Factors more closely associated with falling into one of these two groups included behaviors such as smoking, exercising, and awareness of MyPlate (USDA’s official symbol of the five food groups), which indicate consumer levels of concern for health as well as knowledge of what constitutes a healthy diet. This chart appears in the ERS report Trends in U.S. Fruit Consumption Relative to Recommendations in the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, released in December 2024.