A couple of weeks ago we wrote about the sacred cow of OJ nutrition being mercilessly slayed over at the Los Angeles Times. To quickly remind you – the theme is that Orange Juice is high in sugar, low in fiber, and contains vitamins and minerals that are abundant in a normal diet – overall it does more bad than good for most people.

The Florida Department of Citrus was obviously not happy with all this OJ negativity. They sent a letter to LA Times reporter, Karen Kaplan, respectfully disagreeing with the articles content. They also sent copies to blogs such as Fooducate. (download WORD doc here).

As an additional measure, the Citrus folks enlisted a dietitian, Gail Rampersaud, to write letters to all the skeptics, extolling the virtues of the Juice. An LA Times Article from Wednesday brings the dietitian’s letter, and a response from one of the skeptics, Dr. Robert Lustig, a pediatric endocrinologist at UC San Francisco. It’s pretty much a re-run of previous arguments, with a few additional twists.

Pro-OJ:

• One glass counts as a fruit serving.
• Good source of vitamin C, which many people don’t get enough of.
• Citrus juices are more nutrient dense than apple or pineapple juices.
• 100% OJ is free of added sugar.
• The majority of  kids are not getting enough fruit in their diet. A study showed that kids 2-11 who drank OJ were likely to be consuming more fruit as well.
• The 2005 Dietary Guidelines for Americans recognized the nutritional importance of including 100% orange juice in the diet.

Against-OJ:

• The problem is not with fruit, it’s with juice.
• Juice has no fiber.
• Half the calories are from fructose (a sugar). Fructose in high quantities is a burden on the human metabolism.

And you just have to love Dr. Lustig’s eloquence:

The upside of juice consumption is so infinitesimal compared to the downside that we shouldn’t even be having this discussion.

In his response letter he further writes:

I am not against fruit. As far as I am concerned, the most important nutrient contained in fruit (not just citrus, but any fruit) is fiber. “The juice is Nature’s way of getting you to eat your fiber.” Thus, I am not against fruit; indeed I am for it. So the Florida Department of Citrus can rest easy in terms of the citrus crop.

The problem with Florida’s department of citrus is that there’s way too many oranges produced. Too much for people to consume as fruit. So we got juice.

Can anyone else think of a surplus crop whose processing has turned into a profitable business with an unhealthy downside?

If you answered corn and high fructose corn syrup – give yourself a pat on the back.

What to do at the supermarket:

I am still torn by the saddening news that orange juice is not that healthy after all. Decades of programing my brain that this is healthy cannot be erased overnight. That said, in our family the issue is not so critical because we drink tap water 99% of the time. My kids can have whatever they want the rest of the time.

If you are debating between soda pop and orange juice – go for the juice.

If you’re debating between orange juice and water – go for water. And if that’s too hard, you can always water down a glass of OJ and halve the sugar content in an instant.

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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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Many people reading product ingredient lists see these three names quite often. What’s the connection between them, and why do they appear so often in processed foods?

Read more…

[UPDATE June 2, 2009: See response of Florida Department of Citrus in the comments]

More than 620 million gallons of orange juice are sold per year in the United States. There is an undeniable health halo to OJ, but most of it may be unjustified. This, according to author Alissa Hamilton, who has just published “Squeezed: What You Don’t Know About Orange Juice”.

From a recent interview with the author:

[Orange juice is]…a heavily processed product. It’s heavily engineered as well. In the process of pasteurizing, juice is heated and stripped of oxygen, a process called deaeration, so it doesn’t oxidize. Then it’s put in huge storage tanks where it can be kept for upwards of a year. It gets stripped of flavor-providing chemicals, which are volatile. When it’s ready for packaging, companies such as Tropicana hire flavor companies such as Firmenich to engineer flavor packs to make it taste fresh. People think not-from-concentrate is a fresher product, but it also sits in storage for quite a long time.

read more…

What you need to know:

Brazil, not Florida is the primary exporter of oranges these days.

Most of the vitamin C is lost during processing and added again to the juice just before packaging.

The “flavor packs” added to juice include ethyl butyrate, an additive commonly used as artificial flavoring in alcoholic beverages as well as in perfumery products. It is added to orange juice because its odor is akin to  fresh orange juice.

What to do at the supermarket:

Dietitians will tell as well that while drinking processed orange juice is not unhealthy, the health benefits of starting your day off with a glass of OJ have been greatly exaggerated. Your best option to enjoy the full health benefits of an orange are eating the whole fruit (peel it first, though).

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Orange juice is awesome. Nothing like the refreshing juice of 3 or 4 fresh squeezed oranges, tart and sweet at the same time, and chock full of nutrients.

If there’s one company that has turned orange juice into an art form, it’s got to be Tropicana (now a part of PepsiCo). They’ve got a gazillion different varieties, regular juice, light juice, fortified with this mineral, adding that vitamin, more pulp, less pulp, mixed with juice from other fruit, in plastic, carton, small, large, extra large…

It seems that just orange juice takes half up an aisle at the supermarket all by itself.

Therefore it was no surprise that earlier this week Tropicana announced a new line of orange juice under the brand name Trop50. From their PR department:

Breakthrough innovation with the goodness of orange juice and 50 percent less sugar and calories

What exactly is the breakthrough? Read more…