Healthify your supermarket choices.
Orange Juice is Just as Bad as Cola. Really?
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Orange juice is no better for you than soda pop. So say a growing number of health professionals, who are trying to undo more than half a century of consumer mindshare captured by the citrus industry. A fascinating article in the LA Times brings us the “juicy” details:
“It’s pretty much the same as sugar water,” said Dr. Charles Billington, an appetite researcher at the University of Minnesota. In the modern diet, “there’s no need for any juice at all.”
A glass of juice concentrates all the sugar from several pieces of fruit. Ounce per ounce, it contains more calories than soda, though it tends to be consumed in smaller servings. A cup of orange juice has 112 calories, apple juice has 114, and grape juice packs 152, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The same amount of Coke has 97 calories, and Pepsi has 100. read more…
According to these numbers, people should be drinking less juice and more soda. But that’s not the whole picture. Fruit juice has lots of benefits such as vitamins and minerals, doesn’t it?
The answer is not so simple. Vitamin C, for example is totally lost through the processing of oranges, but is then added again before packaging. But fiber, which can be found in abundance if you eat the actual fruit, is all but gone from the resulting juice. Also, many juices are fortified, for example with calcium.
The correct answer is that people should be drinking lots more water and a lot less of everything else. Most of a person’s calories should come from food, not liquids. It is very hard to get satiated from liquids, but very easy to gulp down three, four, even five hundred calories, mostly from the fructose in juice, all in a single sitting.
What to do at the supermarket:
Opting for juice instead of pop is a first and important step for parents. More than anything it is an acknowledgment that sugary soft drinks are unhealthy and an alternative is needed.
But the next step should be encouraging children to drink more water and eat real fruit. If your kids love juice and guzzle down more than a cup or two a day, consider watering it down in order to reduce both the calorie count and the sweetness. You can start with just a bit of water and then work your way to half n half.
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Check out Squeezed by Alissa Hamilton and you’ll learn the unsweetened truth about orange juice.
Like chocolate milk, juice is another drink that helps to make your dentist rich!
I agree, OJ is far better than soda. But we do keep an eye on the sugar. One trick we have used with our kids which limits their OJ consumption is to offer it not as juice but as a frozen “ice cream”.
http://www.littlestomaks.com/2008/12/product-review-homemade-oj-ice-cream-cup/
Freshly squeezed OJ is the best of course. We do enjoy it on weekends sometime.
Verrrrry interesting. This is a sobering assessment of the remarkable success of the powerful citrus producers lobby. In fact, they have been so successful that in many families, mine included, pouring those little glasses of orange juice every morning has become a breakfast tradition for GENERATIONS. This is a strong habit to break – like telling consumers they ought not to eat turkey at Thanksgiving!
Will we be as successful in replacing that glass of sugar-water with a piece of fruit each day?
As the book ‘Squeezed Out’ reminds us, introducing the concept of daily orange juice was an initiative of the citrus industry specifically to increase declining sales of their fruit (because it takes so many more oranges to make one glass of juice).
No doubt, the citrus lobbyists will be all over Dr. Billington and his work!
Great post, thanks for highlighting this important health topic. I can’t believe that people can’t figure this out for themselves. I grew up with nasty juice from frozen concentrate…my parents should have just let me suck on a sugar packet instead. Now I reserve freshly-squeezed orange juice as a rare treat and my pancreas thanks me for it!
I agree with watering it down (half & half), which is what I’ve been doing to juices for years. You get something more interesting than water, and some vitamin C and potassium, but without so much sugar. It actually tastes better once you get used to it — less syrupy, more refreshing, like a spritzer. Add a splash of lime for more flavor (and additional vitamin C). It’s definitely better than soda this way, and so easy to do.
When I walk past the juice isle (yes, one half of an ENTIRE isle at my Harris Teeter is allllll juice…and it’s directly across from the cereal/oatmeal. Nice product placement, eh?) in my grocery store I tell my two year old that the stuff is toxic poison…and that “wouldn’t you love an apple instead??” She agrees. I know that’s bad, and might possibly bite me in the rearend one day, but it’s worked so far. She prefers an actual apple (with the peel, mind you) or an orange to juice. Little victories!
It’s not so much of the calories – you could reduce a lot of calories by reducing or staying away from meat and dairy products.
Fruit juice you make at home, from non-GMO fruits, have NO ARTIFICIAL sugar – xylitol, sorbitol, splenda, aspartame, whasoever.
However, fruit juice from any fruits or combination of fruits – can be deadly to diabetics. Normal people should really drink fruit juice with 40% freshly juiced vege — this combo prevents any likelihood of becoming diabetic.
I cannot give up my fresh squeezed orange juice when we have the wonderful Tarocco blood oranges in season here in Italy, in the months of January and February. I look forward to that time every year.
I don’t drink any other OJ at any other time of year, and absolutely not packaged juice. And a couple of months is only a little over 25 Saturdays or Sundays!
@Carmelita – sounds delicious…send us pics when you pick the first batch.
““It’s pretty much the same as sugar water,” said Dr. Charles Billington, an appetite researcher at the University of Minnesota. In the modern diet, “there’s no need for any juice at all.””
>> maybe “overprocessed” OJ….Dr.Billington should be ashamed.