Juice may taste good, but unlike the fruit, it’s not healthy

This article primarily uses &quot;juice&quot; as a synonym for &quot;commercial fruit juice.&quot; In addition, it&#x27;s suggesting that it&#x27;s not healthy&#x2F;necessary to drink such commercial fruit juice daily.<p>If you&#x27;re consuming smoothies which use the entire fruit&#x2F;veggie that you&#x27;d normally eat, and you&#x27;re not adding sweeteners, and you don&#x27;t have any health issues that might be related to excess calories in your diet, then no need to attack the article, it&#x27;s not addressing you.<p>But even then, note that the article still makes the point that people tend to over-consume when drinking their calories as opposed to chewing them.<p>As an example of one of my smoothies that I make at home that I don&#x27;t think this article would take issue with: 100g frozen blueberries, 1 medium (126g) banana, 14g raw almonds, 100g spinach, 14g whey protein powder, 6g unsweetened cocoa powder, 10g fish oil, water. This is about 440 calories (18g fat, 56g carbs, 22g protein) according to My Fitness Pal.

We&#x27;ve successfully convinced our two-year-old that unsweetened, carbonated water is &quot;juice&quot;. She frequently goes to restaurants and is very excited to get &quot;juice&quot; from the bar, and considers it a special treat. Eventually this will surely fail when her friends can explain reality. But until then it&#x27;s working great to avoid massive loads of sugar in her early years.

I don&#x27;t have proof for the following, but I think the article should qualify the type of juice being consumed. I regularly make juice from raw vegetables (ginger, cucumber, carrots, beets, celery, parsley, cilantro, yams, kale, chard, brussel sprouts etc) and I suspect that the sugar content is less than fruit juice. Personally I don&#x27;t understand why a person would juice a fruit when you can eat it whole? Fruits are so stupidly delicious when eaten whole. In the end, everything in moderation...

I see a lot of people consuming things like juice, whole grain breads, breakfast cereals, sugar-filled nut butters and yogurts, etc. claiming they made &quot;healthy&quot; choices. Of course everything is fine in moderation but a heaping pile of sugar and simple carbs with no lean proteins, good fats or greens is far from healthy. The solution would seem to be better nutrition education so that more people recognize the fat free yogurt they just felt good about eating had 25g of added sugar per serving.

Are fruit actually healthy?<p>It&#x27;s one of those assumptions we make that everyone knows is true but do we have any real evidence that fruit consumed in quantities that where it have an real impact on our caloric intake provide &quot;health benefits&quot;.

Anyone who has ever pressed an orange knows that you need at least 4 or 5 of them to make a whole glass. The amount of sugar is astonishing. I personnally water down my grapefruit five folds...

Why not make a smoothie which leaves all the body of the fruit inside the drink. Add a bit of water and nuts perhaps and there you go.

My 95 year old (!) yoga teacher used to say, &quot;eat liquid, drink solid&quot; in his native tongue. It meant that when you ingest something a liquid like soup or juice, let it not rush down the throat; it should spend a nice chunk of time in the mouth, like a solid. In other words, &quot;eat it&quot;. Likewise, when you have something solid, chew it until it &quot;liquefies&quot;.

People critique this piece as inaccurate but should instead should realize the way to attract attention is to get you first to read it. It then gets people talking. If you really get his point, he meant drinking juice that filters out the pulp isn&#x27;t as good as filtered, and maybe harmful given that example he noted.

A large distinction needs to be made between juice you drink within an hour of the fruit being crushed, versus drinking stuff a few months later, stuff that&#x27;s been preserved via various bizarre tricks to keep it safe from oxygen.<p>Without intervention, the oxygen in the air will break down most of the healthy stuff within an hour or two. If you juice carrots and drink it immediately, there are benefits.<p>What you see in the USA, with the stuff called &quot;orange juice&quot; often makes health claims that should be disallowed. &quot;All natural&quot; and &quot;contains Vitamin C&quot; are highly misleading, considering the actual process that the juice is put through, so it can survive for months on the shelf in some store.

The realnews headline: &quot;Juice in excess is not healthy. Same goes for fruit.&quot; Guess that wouldn&#x27;t get many clicks.<p>As long as you don&#x27;t consume too many calories or spike your insulin too high by drinking large quantities at once, juice can be healthy. The phytonutrients and vit c will prevent the uric acid serum spike you get from fructose, soft drinks have also been proven not to increase c reactive protein. Although with less fiber it&#x27;ll always be inferior to eating (or drinking) whole fruits.

I eat a lot of fruit right now. About 4 oranges and 1-2 bananas a day. I&#x27;m actually worried that my sugar consumption is too high even from these natural sources. Anyone have some insight?

Tldr; eat fruit and smoothies, don&#x27;t drink juice<p>&quot;Pulp&quot; left behind during juicing contains the most wholesome parts of fruits, which prevent glucose spikes and contain most micronutrients

An interesting analogy to think of is eating fruit naturally is like chewing coca leaves. Drinking fruit juice would be like snorting cocaine.

I don&#x27;t get. If you drink 500ml of juice your intake will be ~250-300 kcals. Then what? On a non-active day I burn ~3000 kcals a day. If you hit the gym you can easily burn an additional 700 kcals per hour. To be fit, you need to be active, and to be active you need energy.

Are fruit even healthy, given sugar and all? (trying to justify my lack of affection to them)

&quot;juice&quot; may be bad (filtered water, flavoring from cologne makers, syrup), but what about whole blended fruits?

I wonder how do cold pressed vegetable&#x2F;fruit juices compare to plain fruit juice?

I continue to be impressed by the pushback by the corn industry on HFC.<p>Quick, someone prove fruits and vegetables are poison!<p>I&#x27;m not saying that there isn&#x27;t something to what they&#x27;re saying, but the timing is... shall we say... convenient.

The article seems to point to these two as the main reasons why fruit juice is not as good as fruit:<p>1) <i>when you make juice, you leave some of the most wholesome parts of the fruit behind. The skin on an apple, the seeds in raspberries and the membranes that hold orange segments together — they are all good for you. That is where most of the fiber, as well as many of the antioxidants, phytonutrients, vitamins and minerals are hiding. Fiber is good for your gut; it fills you up and slows the absorption of the sugars you eat, resulting in smaller spikes in insulin.</i><p>2) <i>when you drink your calories instead of eating them, your brain doesn’t get the same “I’m full” signal that it does from solid food, even though you wind up consuming far more calories in the process.</i><p>[edit: clarified text is quoted from the article]

First they came after milk and now juice

This article is largely non-sense and not scientific at all. Here we go again with the fruit = sugar = evil, when I have yet to see an overweight person that eats too much fruit. There are communities of people called fruitarians that only eat raw fruit and vegetables and are largely very healthy. And yes.. they juice.<p>The problem with diabetes is that the cells of the body have too much saturated fat which blocks in the insulin receptors.

Strange... the author claims milk is necessary for healthy growth in young children (which is ridiculous in its own right) and links to a study on fruit consumption.

I don&#x27;t even have to check to know that this &quot;research&quot; was funded by one of three groups...<p>1. The Corn Industry because they want us to believe that high-fructose corn syrup is just as healthy as natural fruit sugars<p>2. The Dairy industry because they want us to believe drinking fresh juice is just as bad as drinking anything else<p>3. Big Pharma because they don&#x27;t make money on healthy people. They need us to keep buying prescription drugs so that they remain profitable.

Misleading title -- Vegetable juice isn&#x27;t bad like fruit juice. We should be targeting &quot;sugar&quot; and not &quot;fruit&quot; or &quot;juice.&quot; Sugar from fruit isn&#x27;t as bad as processed sugar, but from my experiences, too much fruit has the same negative effects as eating candy or sugar laced cereal. Fruit in moderation seems to be ok.

People tossing around the word &quot;healthy&quot; like it&#x27;s a well-grounded term.<p>Obviously, juice is full of vitamins and micronutrients. It&#x27;s dense as hell. It&#x27;s an expressway to diabetes if you drink lots of it. But damn if it isn&#x27;t an effective cure for scurvy, low blood sugar, fainting, etc.<p>I don&#x27;t disagree with the article; however, the moralizing of health is absolutely moronic. There aren&#x27;t good foods and bad foods; there is only nutrition and the decisions you make.<p>Edit: from the same goddamn newspaper: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.washingtonpost.com&#x2F;lifestyle&#x2F;food&#x2F;no-food-is-healthy-not-even-kale&#x2F;2016&#x2F;01&#x2F;15&#x2F;4a5c2d24-ba52-11e5-829c-26ffb874a18d_story.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.washingtonpost.com&#x2F;lifestyle&#x2F;food&#x2F;no-food-is-hea...</a>

Although I&#x27;m a proponent of smoothies over juices, I disagree with this article&#x27;s stance. The article argues that drinking juice leads to diabetes:<p>&quot;She had always been overweight and had relatives with diabetes, but she believed she lived a healthy lifestyle. One of the habits that she identified as healthy was drinking freshly squeezed juice, which she saw as a virtuous food, every day. We asked her to stop drinking juice entirely. She left the office somewhat unconvinced, but after three months of cutting out the juice and making some changes to her diet, her diabetes was under control without the need for insulin.&quot;<p>Read between the lines: &quot;she had always been overweight ... she made some changes to her diet&quot;. I highly doubt that cutting out juice, and juice alone, resulted in the patient living a healthier lifestyle. This is misleading. Unless the patient was downing a gallon of juice every day, eliminating juices—from whole fruit, not processed concentrated crap—would not solve her diabetes.