“POM Wonderful” is a juice that we enjoy on occasion because it tastes great. The tart and sweet flavor mix is an acquired taste, but served very cold it is just lovely. Perhaps, even wonderful. And you’ve got to love the original bottle shape, not to mention the overall amazing marketing this company does.

But what about all those superfruit health claims? Will it really make us healthier?

We decided to take a deeper look inside the label. Read more…

Earlier this Month, the FDA sent a Warning Letter to Nestle USA regarding three Juicy Juice products: Juicy Juice Brain Development Fruit Juice Beverage (Apple), Juicy Juice All-Natural 100% Juice Orange Tangerine, and Juicy Juice All-Natural 100% Juice Grape. Here’s why:

1. “No Sugar Added”. This statement appears on all 3 products, but is not allowed if the product is targeted at children under 2 years old. The Juicy Juice website additionally states “Naturally Lower in Sugar”, again, unallowed for products intended for children under 2 years old.

2. 100% What? Take a quick look at the product name: Juicy Juice All-Natural 100% Juice Orange Tangerine. Reads as if it is made solely from Oranges and Tangerines. WRONG! It is 100% juice but in fact, most of the juice is from apples. In finer print, once can read “Flavored juice blend from concentrate with other natural flavors & added ingredients“.  Tricky! According to the FDA,

The manner in which the latter statement is presented makes it less conspicuous and prominent than the other label statements and vignettes and therefore less likely to be read or understood by consumers at the time of purchase.

Nestlé confirmed the company had received the letter on the Juicy Juice products. “We are intending to fully cooperate with the FDA in bringing this matter to a conclusion,” a spokesperson said.

What you need to know:

In every regulated industry there’s a cat and mouse game between companies and regulators. No different is the food industry and its main regulator, the Food and Drug Administration. Companies are so eager to create a competitive advantage through marketing, that they stretch the truth, often times falling down a slippery slope to misleading claims.

Nestlé is no better than the rest. We wrote about Juicy Juice in the past. Its marketing tactics are such a pile of BS.

What’s with “Brain Development” you ask? Although DHA (an omega 3 fatty acid) may help with brain development, the evidence is still very shaky, and the downside of such a sugary drink far outweigh the brain benefits.

A half a cup serving (for toddlers) contains TWO AND A HALF TEASPOONS OF SUGAR! This is not a product that should be served regularly to children or toddlers.

What to do at the supermarket:

It appears that now we can’t even trust the NAME of a product to be accurate anymore. The best suggestion when shopping is to keep your eyes focused just on the ingredient list and nutrition facts panel. Regarding juice for children, and especially babies and toddlers – save yourself some money and a future of cavities and fighting with your kids – Serve only water from the day they start drinking.

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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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Mott's for Tots® Juice

Would you pay more for beer that was watered down by 40%?

What if we told you it was healthier or you?

Mott’s, icon of everything apple, is offering your kids the same deal, but for apple juice.

They’ve introduced a line of juices for young children – Mott’s for Tots, with 40% less sugar, but 10% more expensive. Not a lot of food science went into this formulation. Mott’s simply replaced 40% of the juice with good old water. Marketing science – yes.

What you need to know:

Why water down  juice?

Apples, like many other fruit, are sweet. They contain plenty of sugar. A medium apple has 18 grams (3.5 teaspoons).

When squeezed into juice, the sugar content is even higher. An 8 fl oz serving of apple juice has 23 grams of sugar (4.5 teaspoonfuls). Mott’s for Tots has only 13 grams (2.5 teaspoonfuls). Parents that would like to reduce their children’s sugar consumption now have a panacea. Just imagine all the thank you letters pouring into Mott’s mailroom:

“Thank you Mott’s; it was just too hard to add water on my own…”

This is a sweet deal for Mott’s. It costs shoppers $3.59 for a 64 fl oz bottle of “regular” apple juice, but the healthier tots version is $3.99. This is a 10% premium for the consumer. But the profit margin is even higher for Mott’s. Remeber, 40% of the juice is not juice anymore but water (Mott’s calls it purified water; just between us though, this means filtered tap water that costs close to nothing).

If you can get your kids to drink water from the get go, do it. Apple juice can be a nice treat here and there. But avoid making it a daily ritual. Pouring anything other than water in baby bottles or sippy cups, is a dental disaster. Even in the tots version, the amount of sugar loving bacteria that forms around juice cloaked teeth is a thousandfold more than the herds of buffalo roaming the great plains 300 years ago.

What to do at the supermarket:

Get your apple goodness from real apples, especially local and in season (July-December). Apple juice should be no more than an occasional treat. If you really must drink it, store brand is just as good as branded juice, at significant savings of up to 30%. And in these rough economic times, really do yourself a favor – water down the juice at home.

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1. Before going to the supermarket, make a shopping list. And then stick to it. Market research shows that 1 in 2 products in our shopping carts are an impulse buy. Many times these are not items we really need. Supermarkets are designed to lure us to into buying more more more in the 24 minutes we spend on average roaming the aisles. The enticements during our seven minute wait at the checkout counter are also unnecessary most times, yet expensive at all times.

2. Stop buying soft drinks! Hard to imagine, but you really are paying a lot of money for carbonated water mixed with food coloring and heaps of high fructose corn syrup. On average every man woman and child consumes over 50 GALLONS of soft drinks annually. A family of 4 switching to tap water can save over $500 a year! Go ahead, drink a glass of water and watch your piggy bank swell with pride. I this is too drastic, at least switch to 100% fruit juice.

3. Drastically cut down on sugary, salty, and fatty snacks. Limit yourself to 2 or 3 items per grocery trip. If your children protest, practice a revenue share model with them – for every dollar in grocery bills saved, they keep 50 cents.

4. Switch from brand name products to store brands. Whether frozen foods, dairy, staples, or canned goods, a store brand is usually just as tasty and nutritious, but costs 10-25% less.

5. Use coupons. Wisely. Don’t buy a year’s worth of canned prunes to save a dollar when the last time you had prunes was at your grandma’s birthday in 1993.

6. Shop less. Plan your shopping trips for once a week at most. Those short trips to the grocer for one item usually end up with many more items in your shopping bag.

7. Eat more homemade food, even out of the home. Prepare sandwiches for lunch; or bring leftovers in a Tupperware dish to heat in the office microwave.

8. Don’t throw away food. Bananas gotten too mushy? Toss into the blender, add milk honey, and ice cubes to get a wonderful smoothie. Stale bread? Check out some bread pudding recipes.

9. Go meatless a day or two a week. To some this may sound like an abomination, but statistically, vegetarians are healthier and live longer. For protein on your off days, try different types of beans, tofu, lentils, quinoa, and grains, with plenty of vegetables and fruits. Add nuts and seeds to salads, sauces and desserts.

10. Learn to cook. Cooking is NOT heating a canned soup or nuking a TV Dinner in the microwave. Really cook. you’ll be surprised how easy it is to prepare healthier and cheaper a tomato based pasta sauce when you do it yourself. Have the kids join and help you. There’s no shortage of recipe websites today, some include video tutorials.

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Watered down

The Consumerist blog brings the following to our attention, comparing Mott’s Apple Juice with Mott’s Light Apple Juice:

Here’s a perfect example of why you should always approach “healthy” labeling on food products with a skeptical eye…except for a few added vitamins, the Light product was just Mott’s juice diluted by 50% with water—but selling for the same price as the 100% juice.

read full post

What you need to know:

Watering down juice has several benefits – less calories and less tooth decay, especially with toddlers using sippy-cups. Cheaper to do this on your own than to pay the manufacturer. Cheaper still – drink water, eat an apple or apple sauce to get the vitamin goodness.