Mom's only a little bit right about eating your veggies.

People want to live as long as they can and stay healthy as long as they can. Nothing new there.

But the lifestyle changes many of us try to implement to thwart cancer, obesity and heart disease are often less effective than we've led ourselves to believe.

Yesterday a study from Mount Sinai School of Medicine added to the evidence that the impacts of eating five plus servings of fruits and vegetables had a very little effect on the chance of developing cancers.

Specifically, eating 200 additional grams of fruit and vege every day reduced your cancer rate by 3 percent over a lifetime.

(Per my trusty food scale, a dozen strawberries, 2 medium sized pears or 40 teeny-tiny stalks of asparagus are all about 200 gram servings.)

The researchers didn't break down the results by types of cancer, except for those caused by heavy drinking. In drinkers, increased produce eating had a stronger effect on boozing related cancers.

Even though the study included more than 400,000 people followed over 8 years, the effects were so small that researchers caution reading too much into their results.

I think these results should point to changing the few behaviors we KNOW cause cancers: unprotected sex, boozing, too much sun and smoking--this sounds like Jersey Shore--and stop worrying too much about the rest.

The interaction between our genetic predispositions and our environmental exposures may always dwarf the small lifestyle changes we can make.

But, please continue eating your fruits and vege and strive to include more. By eating all of these foods you may end up too full for that cheeseburger and consume fewer calories, lowering your chance of becoming obese, which the National Cancer Institute says significantly increases your risk for many types of cancers.