News

This seems like it would be really obvious, no?

If you are simply buying fruit juices at the store you are getting zero to virtually zero fiber. So you are getting a bunch of calories but without feeling any sense of fullness that you would get if you instead just ate the fruit.

Fruit is healthy but you are much better off just eating the fruit and drinking water. If you really want to drink the fruit juice you should just blend the fruit so that you are also getting all the pulp. The fiber is excellent for you and will help prevent you from turning all that juice into "empty" calories.

Haven’t they known this for decades now?

Fruit juice is all the sugar in fruit but without any of the fiber.

WATER motherfuckers, water

I have a very vivid memory of working with this girl who had a neck so large that it hung down like a bullfrog's sack. I had lost some weight myself and we were discussing nutrition and my high water consumption, and I remember she looks at me very seriously and a little exasperated and says, "I'm eating healthier too. I stopped drinking so much pop and switched entirely to juice."

People really do believe that pure fruit juice is good for your body. I think it's largely due to the average person's inability to understand caloric intake and how to decipher a nutrional chart.

Most people have zero clue about how nutrition works. It makes sense, educators don't really spend time teaching it. We had the 4 food groups and the food pyramid, both of which tend to favor eating a shitload of bread as your main caloric intake, which has obviously been debunked. We had the great sugar vs fat debate of the 90s. Now people are skeptical of nutrition as a concept and think "oh, fruit juice, that's healthy". Can't really blame people for not knowing everything, but damn, food is important. Garbage in, garbage out.

Everyone has been on this tangent for years, this isn't exactly news. I think it's worth noting that the problem isn't really this simple. They concentrate the juice and pump it full of "juice" that is really just sugar. If you actually buy real pressed 100% blueberry juice, for example, instead of apple sugar flavored with blueberries, the sugar content is lower. And because you would never actually want to drink 100% blueberry juice because it wouldn't taste how you are expecting, you would water it down. Suddenly you have a glass of juice with 5 grams of sugar instead of 30 grams and you are fine. Additionally, no matter the type of juice, it is nearly always over concentrated because they are trying to boost the sugar content. People should really be watering down any kind of store bought juice.

No one is actually drinking "100% juice", they are drinking a product that resembles the fruit of juice. These companies are not squeezing juice into a bottle, they are concentrating fruit sugars and adding them back into water. The problem is just as much with false advertising as anything. I'm not saying freshly squeezed juice is healthy, but it as sure as shit healthier than the fraud they are selling on the shelves. As with everything, the problem is money. Companies know they will sell more if they say it's juice and then pump it full of extra concentrated fruit sugar.

Edit: I wish more companies sold actual 100% real pressed fruit juice, I would buy it and water it down with soda water. I also wish they were more honest with their labeling about what they are actually doing. Not everything needs to be flawlessly healthy, but we could take steps in the right direction. You should only be able to label something as 100% juice if it actually is squeezed out of the fruit and put in the bottle with no interference and additional processing.

Y'all, the study clearly says it's the calories. People see it as free calories. The article straight up lies about adults too. The study did not find the same link in adults.

Relevant bit from the study-

Among cohort studies in children, each additional serving per day of 100% fruit juice was associated with a 0.03 (95% CI, 0.01-0.05) higher BMI change. Among cohort studies in adults, studies that did not adjust for energy showed greater body weight gain (0.21 kg; 95% CI, 0.15-0.27 kg) than studies that did adjust for energy intake (−0.08 kg; 95% CI, −0.11 to −0.05 kg; P for meta-regression <.001). RCTs in adults found no significant association of assignment to 100% fruit juice with body weight but the CI was wide (MD, −0.53 kg; 95% CI, −1.55 to 0.48 kg).

Give your kids one child serving a day and fiber from elsewhere. Also make sure they get physical activity in. Done. This isn't Fruit Juice=Soda. Adults probably don't get rated as hard because a pint glass of fruit juice is a lot less of their daily intake percentage wise.

I see so many things blamed for weight gain, but nobody ever seems to talk about the fact that nearly everyone is staying inside more. Kids don't go outside to play like they used to. They play video games and watch YouTube instead of riding bikes and climbing trees. Adults too. The human race is becoming increasingly sedentary. The calories catch up way quicker if you aren't doing anything to burn them. And I'm not pointing fingers here. I do it too.

I saw Hank Green talk about this not so long ago. He says he hates how juice is marketed as a 'healthy' option, when in reality, it's just like flat soda.

Like in an average fruit, there is probably less than a glass of juice. We evolved to eat fruit but not to constantly consume copious amounts of the juice. It's too much sugar and your body Will be worse off for it if you subject it to that amount of sugar for too long.

People should just drink water ffs.

A small glass of juice occasionally maybe if you need it for the anti oxidents or vitamins etc. But not daily and certainly not a huge amount of it.

Ha, I knew my Coke addiction would save me.

Our entire food industry is dedicated to high carb foods that generate more profits. Many, many people cannot handle a high carb diet and wind up fat, or sick. A much lower carb diet, including healthy fats and lots of fiber, lessens obesity, heart problem and diabetes. Been there, done that.

Carbs are carbs, sugar is sugar, high glycemic sugars need somewhere to go quickly

I have a relative, a PhD no less (albeit in English), who "only eat natural organic GMO-free" and will absolutely not accept that fruits are sweet because of sugar and count against you like any other sugar

Hasn't this been well known for a couple decades now? Or is this just confirmation of that?

2010 called, they said "duh"

This is why my kids don't get juice or soda other than special occasions. They get full fat milk twice a day and water all day long.

No fucking shit, dude.

That shit is worse for you than diet soda.

No shit, have you seen the US regulations on that label? You can just squeeze concentrate into sugar water and call it 100% real fruit juice.

Why specifically 100% fruit juice?

Edit: I learned to read. It’s because of the no added sugar.

Added sugar is a problem when it’s added to things that don’t need it. The best way to mitigate this isn’t with a sugar tax, but to tax per calorie in the finished food for any amount of added sugar.

Funny that they didn't go with the constipation angle in addition to the calories angle. You can eat all the fruit you want and pass it well, but if you do just the juice, you get no fiber and you will get blocked up.

BREAKING NEWS: Water may be linked with wetness, experts say

"It's good for you! Here, have some more!"

-- American households with no concept of portion control

I was raised to dilute it with water to get "more" of it.

Something interesting is that the article doesn't differentiate between "from concentrate" and "fresh juice".

It's "no added sugar" metric is flawed too because that likely doesn't count Aspartame, or other alternative sweeteners, as the Nutrition facts do not count them as sugar either.

One word solution:

Fiber

A glass of fruit juice still has calories in it. I would imagine that if you control for everything else that it's still a couple of hundred extra calories that one kid is taking in that some other kid isn't.