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Fruit Drinks Aren't Much Better For You Than Soda: Study (vox.com)
An anonymous reader cites a study on Vox: One of the biggest public health wins of recent decades has been America's slow shift away from soda. But there's pretty good evidence that Americans are still getting hoodwinked by juices and other sugary beverages. Data from Euromonitor, which analyzed U.S. retail beverage sales over the past five years, shows that while the soda category is shrinking, juice sales have held steady, and sales of energy and sports drinks have been growing. An article in BMJ Open demonstrates the extent of the problem: The researchers looked at how much of the American diet is composed of ultra-processed foods and added sugars. They found that 58 percent of total energy intake -- more than half of the calories Americans consume! -- came from foods that are packed with lots of flavors, colors, and sweeteners. And almost 90 percent of the added sugars Americans consume came from heavily processed foods -- the two main sources being soft drinks (17 percent) closely followed by fruit drinks (14 percent). (In this case, 'fruit drinks' refers to processed juices with added sugars.)
The article is very fuzzy when distinguishing between juice and juice drinks. It seems to claim 'orange juice' is very high in sugar, but then implies it means orange juice with added sugar, not pure OJ.
I suppose soft drink vendors could turn this around and say "as healthy as fruit juice" as show by this study.
How you get too much sugar is basically irrelevant.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Only the Food Industry could make fruit unhealthy.
Sugar is sugar is sugar. If you want fruit, eat an actual piece of fruit and get the benefits of the other raw and whole nutrients it contains. It's never a great idea to drink your calories.
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This should not be a surprise to anyone who reads the nutrition label of what they are eating and drinking.
It's so easy to justify consuming almost anything, because there are thousands of web pages that say "that is good for you!"
The old standby that almost everything we eat is 'good for you' in limited quantities. A pack of cards sized steak is good for you, a couple times a week. Same with fish, chicken, coffee, wine, etc...
The problem is when you're having 24oz of soda with every meal.
Personally, from what I've read fruit drinks are basically only lacking carbonation to be a 'soda'. Even fruit drinks aren't as good as, well, eating the fruit involved because there's lots of nutrients you're losing out on that was in the pulp of the fruit, and besides, the pulp has carbs and fiber that help you feel 'full', which the juice alone will shoot through your system and not satiate you.
I don't read AC A human right
It seems to claim 'orange juice' is very high in sugar, but then implies it means orange juice with added sugar, not pure OJ.
Pure orange juice has about 8.5% of sugar and about 2% of other carbohydrates. That could be called 'very high'
Sure, sugar is sugar but...
Just go into any American Supermarket and look at the ingredients of the things that you put in your basket.
How many have lots of 'High Fructose Corn Syrup'?
You don't need all that sugar. IT is used to mask the crap/cheap ingredients the food processors use.
In some markets it is almost impossible to buy bread that does not contain the evil syrup. I bake my own bread and the amount of sugar (Honey) I add to it is tiny when compared to supermarket bread.
I don't have any other sugar in my home. You don't need it.
Yeah, when you see a doom-and-gloom article like this one, and one of the phrases is "heavily processed" or the new catchphrase "ultra-processed," you can safely ignore it.
"Heavily processed" is such a wide definition that it's effectively meaningless. Anything that contains extra sugar (in any amount), white flour (or any other refined grains), anything that has "artificial" coloring (even if the color comes from natural sources), refined oils (like soybean oil, which was a "health food" twenty years ago), or even low-fat foods (whether or not they're naturally low in fats).
When you get right down to it, these sorts of articles are trying to get you worked up about processed foods - in other words, ANYTHING that comes in a package. "So buy our Cool New Healthy Food, at only three times the price!"
Of course, the people who are worked up about processed foods are just the spiritual descendants of the people who used to tell you to switch to processed food because the older, natural foods were supposed to be bad for you. I remember when the health nuts told us to switch from butter to margarine because butter was bad - and now we know that margarine is immensely worse for cardiovascular health.
>"the two main sources being soft drinks (17 percent) closely followed by fruit drinks (14 percent). (In this case, 'fruit drinks' refers to processed juices with added sugars.)"
It really doesn't matter much if the juice is 100% natural or a dilution with added sugars. It is still sugar without the rest of the fruit solids (which contains fiber, pectin, and other components). Drinking a glass of fruit juice is not a natural way to consume fruit... it is rapidly taking in a huge quantity of unregulated simple calories.
Fruit juice is just mostly sugar water. If you want to be "healthy" and/or lose weight and/or prevent insulin spikes then drink water. Then, optionally eat a single serving of WHOLE fruit (like one apple or one peach or something) if you want fruit.
Pure orange juice has about 8.5% of sugar and about 2% of other carbohydrates. That could be called 'very high'
Not only that, but it's pretty close to what most sodas are, and most juices are have similar numbers as well. It also doesn't take much juice (14 oz, even if it's "natural" or "organic" fruit juice to meet food religion requirements) to exceed the FDA recommendation for simple sugars per day, which is likely too high at this point.
Overconsumption of simple sugars are likely *THE* reason why a lot of people have high cholesterol and fatty liver, and in a 2,000 calorie diet you should probably be consuming less than 20g but ideally zero (there's no nutritional or other physiological need for it.) Cutting out dietary cholesterol and saturated fat from your diet is and always has been the wrong advice for treating these.
Slightly off-topic, but: even an home made freshly squeezed glass of fruit juice supposedly contains more sugar than is healthy for you. Think about it: on average, how much oranges would you need to squeeze for a single glass of juice ? Three or four oranges ? Might not seem like a lot, until you consider *eating* those same four oranges at once. The proclaimed result ? Eating a single orange is good for you, but taking in - the sugars of - four oranges is bad.
Yeah, fruits are high in sugar, but that doesn't mean I want even more sugar / corn syrup to make up for the bad flavor that corn syrup drink makers have to mitigate.
Fruits aren't necessarily high in sugar, but juicing typically keeps the sugar while removing a lot of other materials, making fruit juice have a higher concentration than fruit. The same applies to vegetables by the way, which is why "juicing" or "juice diets" are a pretty dumb idea if the whole point is to be healthier.
If you're paying for someone's health care, it's because you offered to pay. Rescind the offer if you don't like where the money is going.
It's a democracy. I can choose to vote one way or the other, but I can't just decide not to follow the law without nasty consequences.
Humans typically starving and suffering malnutrition most of the time for over a hundred thousand years, and before that our ancestor species back more than a billion years. Our appetite craves the sugar and fat that helped humans stave off death. Now with cheap, abundant, and tasty foods everywhere through technological advances we have to deal with whole populations being over fed. People actually complain food is too easy to consume like processed and fast foods. Many poor people eat better than kings just 1000 years ago.
I love it! There simply isn't a better time to be alive. Give me diabetes and obesity any day over dying at 12 from starvation. I, for one, am grateful to our new corpulent overlords.
"Juicer" typically indicates that you make your own beverage from fresh fruits and veggies, which is not at all unhealthy
That depends on the ratio between fruit and veggies. Most fruit is high in sugar, while most veggies are low. If you juice from pure fruit, it's quite unhealthy.
Even fruit drinks aren't as good as, well, eating the fruit involved because there's lots of nutrients you're losing out on that was in the pulp of the fruit, and besides, the pulp has carbs and fiber that help you feel 'full', which the juice alone will shoot through your system and not satiate you.
Well also they're talking about fruit drinks, not fruit juice. Whenever you see something labelled "fruit drink", it should trigger alarm bells and the question, "why aren't they calling it juice?"
Even things labelled "juice" sometimes have additives, including additional sugar. When it's labelled a "fruit drink", it means that they've doctored it so much and added so much sugar that they're not allowed to call it "juice" anymore. It's sort of like if you go to a mexican restaurant and the stuff they put in the tacos is referred to as something like, "beef-based taco filling." That should immediately make you question what that stuff is.
It's 2016! Who the hell didn't know this already?!?! WTF
I've been hearing this shit since I was a little kid in the 70's. This country has way too many assholes making a living by spreading FUD. NEWS FLASH- IF YOU OVERCONSUME, YOU MAY DIE. Just pick something. It doesn't matter what it is. Water, aspirin, Boones Farm, eggs, republicans, democrats, salt........... Someone please lock these bastards up and throw away the key.
Yeah, fruits are high in sugar, but that doesn't mean I want even more sugar / corn syrup to make up for the bad flavor that corn syrup drink makers have to mitigate.
Fruits aren't necessarily high in sugar, but juicing typically keeps the sugar while removing a lot of other materials, making fruit juice have a higher concentration than fruit. The same applies to vegetables by the way, which is why "juicing" or "juice diets" are a pretty dumb idea if the whole point is to be healthier.
A lot of the "other material" is the fiber from the whole fruit, which slows the digestion of the sugars/carbs. Furthermore, a cup of orange juice contains the juice of several oranges, which would be difficult to consume from whole fruit in one sitting.
You might be interested in this (90min) video, Sugar: The Bitter Truth by Robert H. Lustig, MD, UCSF Professor of Pediatrics in the Division of Endocrinology, in which he explores the damage caused by sugary foods. He argues that fructose (too much) and fiber (not enough) appear to be cornerstones of the obesity epidemic through their effects on insulin. The video also describes, in detail, how different types of sugar are metabolized by the body - for example: glucose, entire body; fructose, only by the liver - like alcohol, but with detrimental differences.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
I think most of it comes from the fact that everybody eats -- and while almost any other subject will only address a fraction of people, foods and drinks are obviously part of everybody's life. So, there's talk about food every day in the newspaper, on the news cable channels...and now on Slashdot.
Trust me, people weren't always so obsessed with food as medicine as they are today. Another thing I can tell you as an older person: These "studies" that refute previous common wisdom come and go with some regularity. First we hear that "food X" is bad for you. Later, that "food X" is good for you. Live long enough, and you'll see it go back and forth a few times. Just eat food, people. You'll be fine. Whether it's drugs, alcohol, soda pop, or whatever - moderation is the key.
-- sudon't
Air-ride Equipped
The danger from lead pipes can be managed. Lead doesn't dissolve well in water and chemicals can be used to reduce this further. The Flint water was safe until the source was switched to water that was acidic which greatly increased the lead in solution.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Research consistently shows that processed mono-sugars are harmful in ways that fruit isn't, even where the total sugar content in the fruit is the same.
And yet, if you process the fruit to extract mono-sugars, they are just as bad as any other mono-sugar, in some cases they're in the worst group.
So it makes no sense to just measure total sugar and presume it is harmful. What appears to matter a lot more for health is added sugar and highly processed foods generally.
Just like white flour is harmful because of the mono-carbs, but whole grain isn't.
The culprit is fructose, not simple sugar. Simple sugar is dextrose (glucose), and can be digested and used by every cell in the body. Fructose is digested in the liver and doing so burns through ATP like there's no tomorrow. Fructose digestion is amazingly similar to alcohol digestion, you just don't get the buzz you do with alcohol.
Table sugar (sucrose) is no better because it's half fructose.
Watch the video at youtube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM
I put exactly one drop of grapefruit oil in each glass of my home made IPA. I count that as juice.
OJ has more sugar in it that coke. At least if you believe the label. Is is "bad" for you. Well everything is so fuck it. I will enjoy my life and not be stuck with boring food for a life time. There isn't even any evidence that you live longer with these "healthy organic(WTF does that even mean) natural diet" ...Probably feels like it however.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
Wouldn't part of the issue be the type of sugar as well? I mean sugars are, like fats, an entire subcategory of complex hydrocarbons. So to compare percentages alone is far too simplistic.
Only crack the nuts that crack. You don't put the ones that don't crack in the sack.