The Juice on Juice

January 7, 2019

Drinking a tall glass of orange juice is promoted as a healthy part of a good breakfast. But is it really all it's cracked up to be?

The short answer is no. WHOLE fruit is good for you, but fruit JUICE is a totally different animal. Fruit juice causes a huge spike (and subsequent crash) in blood sugar -- it is just too much sugar hitting your system too fast (yes, even the kinds of juice that are made without added sugar). Whole fruit contains fiber which naturally slows this process down so that the body can more easily handle it. Plus, drinking an 8oz glass of juice is the equivalent of eating about 3-4 pieces of fruit. It would be difficult to eat 3-4 apples a row -- the fiber would make you feel too full. But it's very easy (too easy) to down an 8oz glass of juice.

And there are other issues with most of the juices you'll find in the supermarket. Many of them are shelf-stable, which means they are full of preservatives (fresh-squeezed juice needs to be refrigerated to prevent spoiling). Even the refrigerated kinds are not actually the 100% pure juice they claim to be -- they can't be if they are mass-produced. The taste of fresh-squeezed juice varies according to the quality of the fruit it came from and how long it has been sitting around. Tropicana (owned by Pepsi, by the way) tastes exactly the same as it did when it first came out in 1954. Why is that?

This snippet by Tom Roston of foodrepublic.com sums it up well (and this information is also on the Tropicana website, believe it or not!): "...oranges only grow in certain seasons, and because orange juice goes bad after a short period of time, orange juice providers had to come up with a way of storing the juice if they weren’t going to go with the old school method of freezing juice in concentrate. What they came up with is a process called “deaeration,” in which the oranges are picked, the oranges are squeezed, the juice is heated to eliminate bacteria, and then the juice is kept in vast, zillion-gallon tanks from which oxygen is eliminated. This allows the juice to not spoil for up to a year. The downside to this process is that the juice loses its taste, so when the juice is ready to be packaged for consumption, flavor packets are added to give it its consistent, “pure,” orangey taste. Fragrance companies responsible for the same formulas used for perfumes come up with the right taste concoctions that you and I know as orange juice."

Does that sound like a healthy part of a good breakfast to you?