are all vegetables really fruits?

Question

I was listening to the radio and heard that really all vegetables are fruits is that true??

Answer 1

It is a fruit when it has a seed inside it. A cucumber is an exception.

Answer 2

No, absolutely not. A fruit is the ovary of the plant. Basically a fruit is where the baby plants come from. The seed is the embryo, kind of like an egg and the fruit is protective tissue around the seed. It also serves as something to attract animals to eat it and disperse the seeds through excrement. Typically vegetables spread their seeds by other means than animals: wind, water, etc.

This may sound somewhat gruesome, but eating a fruit is like eating a womans ovary, while eating a vegetable would be eating her arm. I hope that doesn't turn you off from fruits and vegetables, but it is an easy way to understand the difference from a botanical point of view.

In nutrition however, the line between fruit and vegetable gets somewhat blurred. It has to due with the nutritional content of the fruit or vegetable. For instance, eggplant, squash, cucumber, tomato, and pepper are actually fruit, they are widely regarded as vegetables. Whereas rhubarb is often sweetened, and made into pie, but it is a vegetable. From a nutritional standpoint, potato, wheat, and corn are starches, but corn and wheat are actually fruit and potato is vegetable. It all has to due with the way our bodies process them.

Answer 3

an onion or a cabage is hardly a fruit ,their seeds are seperate on a stem coming from the flower.

dont believe everything the media says ,that is why we have so much confusion.

tomatoes and cucumbers are not the only odd ones out. all the squash and pumpkin also have seeds inside,and calabas,ochra there must be many more .

so is a pumpkin a fruit?????who knows or who cares .
it wont change the taste or anything else.but water melon and melon are ,and they are very similar to pumpkins with everything(the plant ,leaves,the way they grow) except for the taste and texture

call garlic a fruit if you like .few people will agree with that.,including me.

this question has left me more confused than when i started.

Answer 4

The only vegetable this I know of that is really a fruit is a tomato.

Answer 5

No! The only fruit that we think of as a vegetable is the tomato.

Answer 6

I would agree with Andrew except for that some fruit have been modfied so they don't bear seeds (like grapes for example).

My science teacher taught us that in order for something to be classified as a fruit it has to come from a flower. In that respect that would techically mean a lot of "vegetables" are actually fruit.

Answer 7

No,there's a difference between vegetables and fruits,look at the food piramid and see.

Answer 8

Sure. Vegetables means that you can eat the whole plant, or most of it, like potatoes, while fruit are foods that come off plants you can't eat and that have seeds in them. For example, you can eat an apple that has seeds but you can't eat the apple tree itself. But yeah. why? Becasue most people don't bother to eat whole veggies and eat only parts of them, just like we only eat the apple part of the apple tree. :)

Answer 9

Well i would think they would b called fruit, I heard that tomatoes are really fruit.

Answer 10

Not all of them. A TOMATO is a fruit, and there a few others, but I don't think all veggies are fruits.