Getting your 5 A DAY isn’t just good for your health – it could also give you a healthy love life.
Research by three of the UK’s top universities shows that eating the recommended portion of fruit and vegetables every day gives people a golden glow that makes them look more attractive.
The researchers claimed that as we don’t find the yellowy colour more appealing in other contexts, humans have learnt to link bronzed skin with good health.
This could help us pick a mate and also ensure we avoid sickly sorts who might pass on an infection.
The findings come from York, St Andrews and Cambridge University researchers, who took photos of 20 men and women and then adjusted them to create four different versions.
In one set of images, the faces had the golden glow of someone who eats a lot of fruit and vegetables, and in a second, they had the less healthy complexion of someone who eats few greens.
The third and fourth sets also had contrasting skin tones but the faces were jumbled up to create abstract images that were unrecognisable as being human.
Volunteers then rated the attractiveness of the images.
The yellowness of the abstract images, the researches said, didn’t make a difference, but the more golden faces were clearly judged as being better looking.
The results suggest that rather than being a colour we find attractive in general, yellow tells us something special when part of someone’s skin tone.
York University researcher Carmen Lefevre, whose study was reported in the Royal Society journal Biology Letters, said: “This suggests we use it in other people as a quick of who could be healthy and, perhaps more importantly, who may be unhealthy. You don't want to touch someone who has an illness you might catch.”
